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are"

Etna ignites

Challenges for Humanity War on Disease AIDS Turns 20 Cuba Reefs Salt Lake Valley Central Asia Elkton, MD

Produced by National Geographic Maps for National Geographic Magazine

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

GILBERT M. GROSVENOR, CHAIRMAN JOHN M. FAHEY, JR., PRESIDENT AND CEO WILLIAM L. ALLEN, EDITOR IN CHIEF, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE ALLEN CARROLL, CHIEF CARTOGRAPHER

Washington, D.C., February 2002

xtremes of climate

and terrain found on

no other continent

confront all who ‘souTH venture to Antarctica. Almost a cerry s92 iron Dunihel, men named Amundsen, — , ing oop and Scott Cima eae, raced exhaustion, star- cg {Great Wall

in, frostbite, and ae a each other to the South a _— Pole. Planting Norway's Deception flag, Amundsen won. Today's Sram IM Trinity goal is knowledge: Satellite and ground-based observations help scientists understand the continent and its global fetal

f

Wlarence Island

Elephant Island

impacts. The scope and detail achieved by Radarsat’s recent Antarctic mapping missions “was once unimaginable,” according to Ghassem Asrar, NASA’s associate administrator for earth science. “Scientists and engineers have literally created new ways to see the remotest reaches of the planet.”

‘Surface Elevation

oo foot motors

Radarsat Fills in the Blanks

Maps of Antarctica’s interior remained

detailed surface images,

of view excluded more than 1.2 million

‘square miles poleward of about 82° south

latitude. Then in 1997 the Canadian Space A) rotated its Radarsat | sat-

imaged continent in ust 18 days at a resolution an any other seorvey, Complany Redarsare

ANTARCTIC PENINSULA

A mountain range welded to cl is by a relatively thin coat of 200-mile-long peninsula is

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‘A DIFFERENT WORLD Able to survive months of dry, frigid darkness,

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area Ry Mt Woolard Whitmore Mes

Me, Seelig

Ice Sheet Thickness,

MEASUREMENTS OF A PARADOX

it of the world's ent of the

here, yet most of Ar is truly a desert. Thi

Sahara—falls over the high terior of the continent each r. But snow and ice have

years. More

ANTARCTICA

HOLLICK-KENYON PLATEAU

7 &

Me Tabahe

thickest, the mean

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Ice Flow Velocity

ICE ON THE MOVE Sea ice Movement

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MILDER SHORES

round, typical highs separated by only about 10°F. In nearby Holme Bay 8

Rookery Islands. Ono species, the southern giant petrel, breeds nowhere else in the region,

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* Vo

eer

MAC ROBERTSON,

VALKYRIE DOME

THE LONGEST WINTER Over hundreds of thousands of square miles of high plateau, the

id of winter lasts from “Roni through September. From beginning to end of the season, temperatures average minus B0°F.

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ge Bete

a:

AMERY HELE

Glacier

Go Mawnan Escarpavent

THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD The South Pole, elevation 9,301 foet, is unlike any other place on Earth. a

Here the sun rises once each yoar,

DOME ARcUS

around September 21, and sets once sy

each

South Pole & Amunden Scott South Pole

~

4 HERCULES DOME

°

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clear sky almost rop from clouds 0 be seen,

“ ANTARCTICA

AMERICAN

SUNBLOCK Antarctica’s permanent snow cover reflects more than 80 percent of incoming solar radiation, preventing

ria

ut where it

of liquid Lake

low. Located at therlake's south end, Russia's Vostok st n 1983 recorded the lowest rature ever measured on ‘arth: 129°F below zero.

DOME C

Tee Hise

Og ha’

Glacter “ag

BYRD GLACIER AuLeARY, Mulock

‘Tho outflow of this glacior remains dis-

tinct all the way to the edge of the Ross

Ico Sholf, some 270 miles from the foot of the Transantarctic Mountains.

Glacier

COAST

POPULATION DENSITY

yy ‘ Bh. .sANTARCTICA,

Sguthe’ Pole

2 Year-rour © Summer only

Continent for Cooperation

No single nation rules Antar Since 1959 the terms of a multinational ied-

loitation ha

tary activities and mineral nce is mul-

been prohibited indefinite tinational too. Data from automated weath- er stations, critical to safe operations in this tile setting: are free! sherecs Individual nations raaintain beses, Bi ap reveorch projects they support typically involve collaborators from many countries.

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iy

Mimye

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QUEEN

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ICE SHELFS

Bunger Hills

« ° ¥

upp LAW coast DOME

and Wind Flo Sane : : Wrees mel PRINCE Now Zealand's Scott Base and the SHIRASE o = Unived States’ McMurdo Station sup- 291 ft Port the highest concentration of. “2827 m people in Antarctica. They're all vis~ ors: Antareica hes no indigenous fe lation. Over th pop vat A

A ABET oO YT

‘a of Ice

ste Commandant winter comes, the ocean surface tinent. Only about 1/000 stay through Charcot

the winter. Glacier

(per year)

into major drainage basins.

ULTIMATE WINDS >

Kassie winds—cold air down glacial slopes—

bften blow at 80 miles an hour and can exceed 180 miles an hour. Offshore, circumpolar winds and currents push

inst sea ice that rings Ant- arctica each winter, driving the

frozen ocean counterclockwise miles _ kilometers

around the continent. (per day

ed significantly. Less tl Seren i rosk bee

Sues, TALOS DOME pra nak i

BORCHGREVINK

COAST = Admiralty

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Mertz Glacier

ing over an miles

larger than the 1g on map shows imum extent of sea ie). Reducing bsorption of atmospheri carbon dioxide and blocking oce:

4643 or write to National Geographic Maps, PO Box 4357, Evergreen, CO 80437-4357. us on the Internet at nationalgeographic.com.

tn

- Longitede West of Greenwich Wo" Longiade East of Greemwich s You can

nt to NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, February 2002

Stresses between Ss Like a reservoir From S00 miles

i ~ . , faster and slower behind a dam, the above the Earth,

- 5 moving ice masses ” a East Antarctic ice ff Russia's Vostok Sta-

(left), which even- . ' 5 the steep ridge of the white dot (right, at

F tually allow icebergs L> , SS Transantarctic Moun- far left), with the

- TW to break off from the > x tains (right). Between faint line of an

_— HS edges of ie shelves : ’ the mountains and acces track leading ie * i ‘sil Ayear after Radarsat McMurdo Sound to upper right. An

SCO] @) uv Satellites that use visible oy B recorded this image lie the Dry Valleys, ares of smooth kee oy nA . light to gather images, like of the Ronne ie : where desertlike con: shows the outline of ot 7 the Landsat 7 glacier scene IShelf, one of the : P ditions and blasting Lake Vostok, a liquid at left, have created striking @ (below) pro- winds keep some lake buried under

~ is i i | S dan iceberg as f 1,500 square miles of 2.5 miles of ice. The

records of Ariterctc terrain: @s the state of rock and soil free largest subglacial

They require sunlight and ‘ are. from snow buildup. lake known, it may

clear skies however. Cana- da’s Radarsat system (image gallery at right), in contrast, can “see” the Earth’s surface under almost any conditions,

have been isolated from Earth's surface

MSOUND. = 31) : ee PROBING VOSTOK'S MYSTERIES

Lake Vostok tantalizes scientists. lake, and collect study samples—

a sist =

almos Lambert Glacier (above), draining s E.* " t © Highly visible to Radarsat, snow How did the 170-mile-long, 30- all without contaminating this capturing high-resolution an ne ae 350,000 square miles of East Antarc : ' dunes as big as 60 miles long and mile-wide lake form? What keeps unique environment. Space surface data unimpeded by tica. Emptying into the Amery ke } 3 several yards high ripple over large it liquid? What life-forms might researchers hope that tools devel-

i Shelf, Lambert is 25 miles wide and areas. To ground observers in blind- have adapted to its cold, dark, oped for Vostok could someday be fells ashe) Gestapo Lo nearly 250 miles long—one of the ingly white snowfields, the dunes high-pressure depths? New tech- used to explore liquid seas under summer's dense cloud cover, largest ice streams on Earth. are often nearly imperceptible. nologies will be required to pen- the frozen surface of Europa, one etrate the ice cover, explore the of Jupiter's giant moons. Byrd Glacier (left) plunges through ae Oricon vented a Rermrearct

Mountains and into the Ross Ice more than 4,300 ice of 112 miles,

NATIONAL 48 GEOGRAPHIC

Shelf, droppin feet over a

. Vostok Station Rusia i 4

WEIGHT OF THE ICE SHEET The ice mass covering Antarctica is 0 heavy that it depresses the Earth's ‘crust more than 3,000 feet. ice-free

oncealed under the southern ice sheet lie islands, moun-

tains, valleys, and lakes. - award the lend, rather than slopiog While ce shelveson the Altctic ©) - Using more than 2.5 mil- Remrsawerd tin Goup esetione emraarrens dampen Serie Leeeerenee _ ae lion ice thickness measurements marion r 4 aS snomessite Lambert Glacier have : collected over 50 years, scien- ; na southern @ Andes to 4 pattsher tists from 12 countries—the ig 2 ounisins oF this per : FILCHNER “3 a Hiileslick te previa but lneciebt. BEDMAP consortium—have ICE SHELF Lee naece inn cnoatetiee > : created a topographic map b ert ieee =a

of Antarctica’s bedrock land- scape many times as detailed

my SHACKLETONGS RONNE ICE Ice

re * SUBGLACIAL LAKES: SMELF"

. : é ¢ A x nay represent Rotided ;

as earlier renderings. The BeD Pr abet oH SHELF > > rit valley, akin to Siberia’s Lake =

map terrain model appears at AW 2 Some 76 other subglacial lakes neve "=>

right overlaid with satellite ‘been identified, most buried deep }

under the East Antareti¢ fee sheet ‘Subglacial lake

“AAN_T A RoC T Il CoA

imagery of surface details. Vinson Massif

wou? fe 40970

TRANSANTARCTIC MOUNTAINS: The 1,800-mile-long Transantarctic range divides East and West Antarct aks called nunataks oft

CHANGE “™ HEATSUP ON THE PENINSULA

1d sodimentary dopo i ‘more than 500 million years old,

a

Pine Island j Glacian MARIE

Fa Sd uae

2380 m, Me. Takahe

BYRD

“~% Small numbers can have Avvers yh , aes a big effects. The Antarctic 's!0nd Sy ane BIR ve sie Peninsula’s average tem- ee ee

perature has increased by ROSS ICE SHELF about 4°F since the 1950s. PINE 1S! b a , - , OP 5.000 In that same time grasses . sb rea woth . . ~. mM

have spread to new areas, “ ’ merverically penguin colonies have relo-

cated, and some 3,000 square miles of coastal ice shelves have disintegrated. Is this the : j = H . . >

first sign of global warming, i oer ' . - ) v ‘ - 7 poled Lai with ice meltdown and cata- P , 5 3 i 4 .

strophic sea level rise to come? val Most experts say no. What's happening on the peninsula

is a “regional warming in an area with a highly variable ime" climate,” says David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Sur- vey. “By contrast, the climate in the rest of Antarctica is changing very slowly.”

EXTENT OF ICE SHEET

ExtENT OF ICE SHEET

200 million 100 million 70 million 30 million years ago years ago years ago years ago

BALLEWY 75} ; vA

NARAIGSFC

fntarcte Che

me OzONe Measurement

ANTARCTIC

AGES BEFORE THE ICE WHERE ICE MEETS O: Vile With less than one percent of its land million years ago much of it was under Antarctica’s ice sheet and surrounding As each year’s snow accumulates, surface exposed, Antarctica offers few ice. East Antarctica’s bedrock is three oceans form a kind of giant conveyor particles of dust and atmospheric : easily opened windows into its geo- billion years old, among the oldest on belt. Moisture from the oceans falls on chemicals and minute bubbles of oe logic past. Once the moist, temperate _Earth. Built on a jigsaw puzzle of crus- Fossil discoveries reveal a the continent as snow. Centuries of air are trapped among te flakes, © goo core of the Gondwana supercontinent, _tal blocks and dotted with volcanoes Hipereigh oremeelonceat pressure and cold turn snow into ice, inscribing a detailed annual climate = | Antarctica 70 million years ago was (below), West Antarctica is no more Daeatrons anemia which moves—at first imperceptibly log in the Antarctic ice. ce cores— = s00 600. 1200 becoming a separate landmass. By 30 _than 700 million years old. (above) lived some slowly, then gaining speed—down the vertical samples drilled from the ice = ea 200 million years ago in long curves of the ice sheet. Complex sheet—allow scientists to read this “

what are now the Trans.

a thick layer of floating ice over the ocean. Ice turns to water again as warm ocean currents melt the under-

hat are now th systems of tributary glaciers flow into archive. Almost 12,000 feet long, the soo - ! § enormous riverlike ice streams (white ice core collected near Russia's Vos- $ beoo arrows on glaciers, right), some of tok Station records 420,000 years of | B2 36 Tint which move up to a mile and a half climate data (graphs, right), includ- 3 | = Pe we pleloer a year. Fed by this network of ice ing temperature and atmospheric 3 fe =& ge till stand on streams, ice shelves grow past the concentration of the greenhouse A | 4 4 IAlexender blend. grounding line—the last contact point gases carbon dioxide and methane. = | | | | 5° 3 between ice and bedrock—and spread It shows repeated cycles of climate 3 | / | 3°

change, with greenhouse gases con- | tributing significantly to the warm- 150

iT ice Velocity ing in each 100,000-year cycle. It

side of ice shelves and as shelf edges The Antarctic Circumpolar Just-calved icebergs usually also puts current carbon dioxide calve icebergs into the sea. Goren ie roast Anca soetal ones and methane levels in context: Once released into the air, Protocol, CFC concentra. Most experts think this ice-ocean Earth. Strong winds drive Giant bergs with drafts of 33m 10 Driven by human activities—espe- (arr tres hibeedoae ie mbeste dh tverea hea system is near equilibrium, with ice ‘ocean Waters dockwfse In a nearly 1,000 feet can run cially the burning of fossil fuels— ee a accumulation balancing ice shelf losses eg aground and remain lodged concentrations of greenhouse gases 2 periods. Despite dramatic in 2001 the ozone hole : See, by melting and iceberg calving. Climate peed Of hear ae0 oat pata lysate dlp = are higher now than at any time in : reductions in global use of extended over an area eh depene ee cure: = warming could shift the balance, how- inibhit the clurent flows b paopetsea thar Lente almost a half million yeers. CFCs spurred by the United roughly the size of North SAD net £3 : ever, and accelerated melting could through a band of ocean icebergs that con move north éoo,000 300,000 let Meco I Bieri cio le ns Movement of plate raise sea level worldwide. more than 600 miles wide and menace ship traffic.

Crustal block and can extend all the way # Tectonic plate boundary to the ocean bottom.

For information regarding available maps call toll ree 1-800-962-1643 or write to Na

sch) us on the Internet at nationalgeographle.com.

DODGE CARAVAN. Come on. It’s more like “pedal to the metal, go-go-go Mom.” And she drives a

Caravan—the only minivan to offer dual power sliding doors and a power rear hatch. So, Mr. Catchphrase,

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GRAB LIFE BY THE HORNS

r You trust that the ravages of 400 years have not weakened the bases.

You trust the granite bases to support the 24-foot high Corinthian columns.

You trust nothing more than eight columns to sustain a 15,000-ton dome above your head.

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* Jupiter Media Metric Custom category as defined by Microsoft, September 2001, U.S. © 2001 Microsoft Corporation. All fights reserved. Microsoft. MSN. and the MSN logo are ether registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States ‘ond/or other countries The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respecthe owners.

FEATURES

2

32

108

6

War on Disease Microbes threaten billions of people ina world weakened by poverty, war, lack of clean water, and inattention. Former President Jimmy Carter introduces a series examining “Challenges for Humanity” in the 21st century.

BY RICK WEISS PHOTOGRAPHS BY KAREN KASMAUSKI

Search for a Cure Willa vaccine ever suppress HIV, the elusive virus that has caused immeasurable suffering—and more than 20 million AIDS deaths throughout the world?

BY MICHAEL KLESIUS PHOTOGRAPHS BY KAREN KASMAUSKI

Cuba Reefs Gardens of sponges and exotic fish bloom in the pristine cays of Cuba, the Caribbean’s largest submerged island shelf. BY PETER BENCHLEY PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID DOUBILET

Mount Etna Ignites Europe's tallest active volcano erupts in grandeur, enthralling Sicilians and intriguing scientists. BY MARCO PINNA PHOTOGRAPHS BY CARSTEN PETER

Salt Lake Valley Wedged between snowy peaks and its name- sake lake, this fast-growing oasis is ready for its Olympic debut. BY LISA MOORE LAROE PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBB KENDRICK

Central Asia Unveiled From Kazakhs in the north to Pashtun in Pakistan, over 100 ethnic groups call these storied lands home. BY MIKE EDWARDS

ZipUSA: Elkton, Maryland where no-wait marriages once drew movie stars, thousands of couples still come each year to say “I do.” BY MICHAEL E. LONG PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID ALAN HARVEY

MAP SUPPLEMENT: ANTARCTICA

DEPARTMENTS

From the Editor

Forum

EarthPulse Geographica

Behind the Scenes nationalgeographic.com National Geographic TV Ask Us

Final Edit

Challenges

On Assignment Flashback

THE COVER

A fiery new cone on Mount Etna upstages Sicily’s night sky during a recent spectac- ular eruption.

BY CARSTEN PETER

ON THE NGM W

TE nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0202 SIGHTS AND SOUNDS Explore underwater wonders of Cuba. HIV Join our discussion board. DISEASE Karen Kasmauski talks about her coverage. CENTRAL ASIA Read personal accounts of this volatile region. RESOURCES AND LINKS Find extra info on all our stories.

OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE NATIONAL

GEOGRAPHIC

SOCIETY

ae aN HONDA

Were passionate about every engine we build. Its just that some make our hearts beat a little faster.

Honda engineers and their machines. Its a romance that began more than 50 years ago. One that has fueled our dreams and our product designs ever since. We now build more than 11 million Honda engines every year. Yet each engine shares the heritage, dedication and passion of our unrivaled racing program.

But its not only our technology that finds its way from the racetrack to the Hondas and Acuras on the streets. It's also our engineers. Our racing program serves as their classroom. From there, they apply what they learn about engines and innovation to other Honda products. So it should come as no surprise: Every time we start a Honda, it sends our hearts racing.

HONDA

The power of dreams:

rom the Editor

COVER PHOTO BY MARIA STENZEL

oes this little bird look lost? Maybe it’s because we

abandoned him. Late last summer we were planning

a map supplement to accompany our December 2001 Antarctica story. I’d already picked this cover of an adult Adélie penguin on Cape Crozier for the December issue.

Then came September 11.

In a matter of days December's penguin was replaced by a cover story on Abraham, chosen to give background on the common heritage of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For that same issue our National Geographic Maps staff produced, in record time, a new supplement on Afghanistan and Paki- stan. We've since distributed 50,000 copies of this map free to teachers through our state geographic alliances.

We also revised last month’s issue, and this one, to keep you informed about the places in the news. Often our experts are just down the hall. Last month’s “World of Islam” was the work of Senior Editor Don Belt, author of four previous articles on the Middle East for the magazine. And this month Assistant Editor Mike Edwards, in “Central Asia Unveiled,” mines dec- ades of experience reporting on the countries he first saw as a Peace Corps program officer 36 years ago.

Our schedule has settled down for now, but please do your- self and me a favor. Go find your December GeoGrapnic and reread the story on Antarctica, now that you've got the map— and the penguin—to go with it.

Letty Cll

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * FEBRUARY 2002

NATIONAL

GEOGRAPHIC WILLIAM L. ALLEN Editor in Chief

BERNARD OHANIAN, Associate Editor ROBERT L. BOOTH, Managing Editor

SENIOR EDITORS

DON BELT, Exploration

WILLIAM T. DOUTHITT, Story Development JOHN A. ECHAVE, Research Grant Projects CHRIS JOHNS, Illustrations

KENT J, KOBERSTEEN, Photography

LISA MOORE LAROE, Staff Writers JOHN G. MITCHELL, Environment OLIVER PAYNE, Manuscripts CONSTANCE H. PHELPS, Design

LESLEY B. ROGERS, Research CHRISTOPHER P. SLOAN, Art

F. Bell, Carol B. Lutyk, Candice S. Millard, Glenn Oeland, Jennifer Reek, Senior Writers: John L. Eliot, Hillel J. Hoffmann, Alan Mairson, Cathy Newman, ‘Tom O'Neill, Cliff Tarpy, Priit J. Vesilind, Boris Weintraub, A. R. Williams, Margaret G. Zackowitz. Writers: Joe! Bourne, Glenn Hodges, Michael Kiesius, Karen E. Lange, Jennifer Steinberg, Lynne Warren, Research: Sonior Researchers: Elizabeth ‘Connell, Victoria C. Ducheneaux, Alice J. Dunn, Patricia 8. Kellogg, Kathy 8. Maher, Barbara W. McConnell, Mary McPeak, Jeanne E. Peters, Abigail ‘A Tipton, David W, Wooddell. Researchers: Jennifer L. Fox, Susan A. Franques, Nora Gallagher, Mary Jennings, P. Davida Kales, Marisa J, Larson, Cathleen S, Lineberry, Robin A. Palmer, Heidi Schultz, Christy Ullrich, Online: Valerie A, May, Director: Cassandra Franklin-Barbajosa, TV Ualson: Carol Kaufmann

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October 2001

“The Power of Light” generated comments on science, religion, and even a “boorish and inconsiderate” neighbor's floodlights. The article on Southeast Asia’s rain forests inspired more lighthearted responses. One

reader remarked on the picture on pages 32-3: “I love the photo taken by Tim Laman of the cute little critter that looks like a gremlin munching on a cockroach, We should all be so content.”

Tracking the Leopard 1 am dismayed that you grouped sport hunters with poachers as threats to big cats. Sport hunters are responsible for financing sur- veys on which licensing is based, and licensing serves to keep wildlife within critical limits of food and water. Hunters assist in enforcing game laws and have been used by researchers to re- port illegal hunting and poach- ing. They also help people of the bush understand the funds avail- able through proper manage- ment of the resources around them. Please do not group such wildlife conservationists, who are loyal to the cause, with the poacher who indiscriminately slaughters for profit.

LOWELL C. DOUGLAS

Duluth, Georgia

I was thrilled to see Tjololo on the cover, since | have watched him on africam.com. I do believe, however, that the picture of the leopard with the impala kill on pages 98-9 is not Tjololo. You can tell by the markings between

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the eyes and his ears. Tjololo has beautiful dots and his ears are a bit tattered. CAROLE BRUNSON Tampa, Florida

Tjololo is indeed the leopard shown on pages 98-9. The pattern of dots between his eyes is not clear in this side view, but it is there. Kim Wolhuter photo- graphed Tjololo for several years, during which the cat’s ears were nicked and torn in fights with prey and other leopards. This pic- ture was taken before Tjololo’s ears were notched.

I think a lot of people would like to know how Kim Wolhuter got Tjololo to accept his company, since leopards are loners and ter- ritorial animals. JAMES J. COOK Middletown, New Jersey

Kim Wolhuter responds: Basically I hung around and followed Tjo- lolo until he just accepted me as part of the landscape. He did the same with a hyena that constantly followed him.

Rain Forest at Night

In your article on the rain for- ests of Southeast Asia you refer to the lack of political means or will to stop illegal logging in the

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * FEBRUARY 2002

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY

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MISSION PROGRAMS

Anne D. Cowle. Education Foundation: Barbara A. Chow. Exhibits: Susan S. Norton. Expeditions Council: Rebecca Martin. Geography Bee: Mary Lee Elden. Lectures: P. Andrew van Duym, Gregory A, McGruder School Publishing: Ericka Markman, Sr. Vice President. Intemational: Robert W. Hernandez, Sr. Vice President. Human Resources: Thomas A. Sablé, Sr. Vice President. Communications: Betty Hudson, Sr. Vice President

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Camelot Lane

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Public transportation allows millions of people to stay in tempo every day. It gives them the freedom to do the things they like to do most. For some, it may be as simple as catching a ride to band practice or visiting the grandkids. And that makes a community a better place to live and work. To learn more about how public transportation benefits both individuals and communities, visit www.publictransportation.org.

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

FORUM

Power of Light 1am haunted by Joe McNally’s image on pages 30-31 [right]. I couldn't take my eyes off the hazy silhouette of the World ‘Trade Center’s Twin Towers in the background. Who would have thought that background would be so dramatically altered from the time you pro- duced this issue to the time I received it in my mailbox? And who would have thought that a photo of a man chang- ing a lightbulb could make me cry? HOLLEY ARVESEN San Ramon, California

As I read about Luxor Resort and Casino's practice of lighting up space at the cost of 273,000 watts per hour, I see the efforts of countless

conscientious people—those who are doing their share to conserve some of our planet’s finite resources—being effec- tively neutralized.

RICHARD GRANGER

New Providence, New Jersey

On page 23 you explain why distant mountains appear blue. Leonardo da Vinci advised: “Paint five times bluer what you want to be five times farther.” Indeed, in the greatest masters, like Brueghel, the deepest parts of a landscape are a brilliant blue.

UGO BESSI

Rome, Italy

You did not mention a great contributor to the development of light, Nikola Tesla. He de- signed and wrote of countless

uses of light, including com- munication and national de- fense devices. When presented with the Edison Medal in

1917, he was introduced as the “Master of Lightning.” How- ever, of all his awards, which he received from all over the world, it was his certificate of U.S. citizenship that he trea- sured most. This he kept in a locked fireproof safe.

THOMAS C. McCORT

Morristown, Ohio

area. | would like to draw your attention to an optimistic piece of progress. In September repre- sentatives of all regional govern- ments (excluding Malaysia because it does not acknowledge the extent of illegal logging), nongovernmental organizations, forestry experts, the World Bank, and the G8 nations met in Bali, Indonesia, to try to tackle the crisis. They issued a landmark declaration including provisions to prevent movement of illegal timber, raise consumer aware- ness, and enable governments and societies to “prevent, detect, and suppress forest crime.” This is a hopeful indication that the

WRITE TO FORUM

National Geographic Magazine, PO Box 98198, Washington, DC 20090-8198, or by fax to 202-828-5460, or via the Internet to ngsforum@nationalgeograph ic.com. Include name, address, and day. time telephone. Letters may be edited for clarity and space.

devastation in the region is at last being taken seriously. ALICE HACKETT London, England

Treasures of Ancient China “Rising to Life” was colorful and informative. I have been to Xian and had a tour of the site and its museum. Qin Shi Huang Di was a tyrant. He enslaved workers, and many of them died. The terra-cotta warriors were created at a horrific cost to humanity. ALLEN COATES Orange Park, Florida

When visiting the site, we were surprised to see how tall the warriors were. If they were “life- size,” then the average Chinese man as depicted in Hongnian Zhang's illustration on page 54 would have been over six feet tall. JAN-DIRK AND RITSUKO WAGENAAR Salamanca, Spain

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC +» FEBRUARY 2002

Figures from Pit 1 are about five and a half te feet tall—a plau- sible range for northern Chinese soldiers then and now. But “life- size” does not imply exact realism; officers, for example, were always portrayed as taller than ordinary soldiers, whatever the height of the living models.

Thank you for your splendid coverage of the sites being exca- vated in Xian, China. The cap- tion on page 59 describes two tablets as “board games similar to chess.” I suggest the possibility that you have depicted a board used to play weiqi, known in Japan and in the West as go. In ancient China weiqi was consid- ered an art form and was an accomplishment required of a nobleman. It would have been an integral part of the lighter side of court life.

ROY LAIRD President, American Go Association New York, New York

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1-800-WANT-AWD. The 2002 Subaru Outback. The World's First Sport-Utility Wagon? The Beauty of All-Wheel Drive.

Performance claims based on USAC-certified lateral acceleration and evasive lane-change tests, Outback Limited shown. The ABC's of Safety: Air bags. Buckle up. Childran in back.

FORUM

Board games of strategy were cer- tainly important at the Qin and Han courts, but literary sources link these tablets to liubo, another such game. It was thought to be played by the immortals as well as humans and may have included an element of divination.

You gave several possible reasons for the face of the mystery sol- dier to be painted green. It may be that terra-cotta images were painted green to make them look like bronzes, which develop a green patina and were of high importance in ancient China. In antiquity ceramic objects were sometimes decorated to look like another material. JAMES F. NEWELL Big Bear City, California

The Qin valued bronzes, but they kept them highly polished. An- tique bronzes that had turned green over time were not collected and prized until much later.

Swahili Coast Zanzibar is an incredible island. The tolerance between differ- ent ethnic groups and religions is unique. But the way you described and pictured Zanzibar is too romantic. The poverty and sickness I witnessed in 1997 are nowhere mentioned. Often the change in my pocket was worth two or three daily salaries, and I am a middle-class citizen of a rather poor country.

GORAN PALADIN

Zagreb, Croatia

I just returned from a wonderful holiday in Zanzibar. Your article brought it to life so well that 1 felt as if I was still there. The people are so warm and tolerant. I was in Zanzibar when we

heard the terrible news about the attacks on the United States.

The Zanzibaris were as shocked and distressed at the news as

The way you described and pictured Zanzibar is too romantic... . The change in my pocket was worth two or three daily salaries, and | am a middle- class citizen of a rather poor country.

we were. Africa is a wonderful and compelling continent and will continue to call me back at regular intervals. I hope the Western world will wake up to the immense problems these wonderful people encounter with great fortitude and cheerfulness. RHODA SWAN Linlithgow, Scotland

Why was the Portuguese occupa- tion of Zanzibar summarily dismissed as “brutal”? In the late 15th century Portuguese ships entered the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea. Fighting ensued because Arab-ruled states in Africa and western India natu- rally wanted to keep their monopoly on trade. What did the U.S. do when North Afri- cans harassed their shipping in the early 19th century? They sent their frigates. That was what Portugal did, as well as erecting fortified outposts to protect its anchorages.

MANUEL C. CERQUEIRA

Lisbon, Portugal

California’s Volcanic North

I was surprised and overjoyed to read your article on northern

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + FEBRUARY 2002

California’s volcanoes. Your descriptions of the terrain and the pragmatic people were accurate, but no mention was given to a recent decision by the United States Bureau of Reclamation to cut vital water supplies to wildlife refuges and farmlands of the Klamath Basin. It is of little relevance in geo- logic time, but it threatens the agricultural way of life in this isolated area. STUART MILES Charleston, South Carolina

In 2001, a year of severe drought, the bureau temporarily interrupted some allotments for irrigation

and refuges in order to maintain the stream flow and lake levels required to protect several endan- gered fish species.

Geographica Jim Hellemn’s life-size photo- graphic mural of Bloody Bay Wall is simply drop-jaw stun- ning. It is also a tremendously powerful monitoring tool for marine ecologists. The last sen- tence reads, “Perhaps marine biologists studying coral reefs around the world will take note.” Marine ecologists have studied coral reef dynamics for decades using sequential photographs obtained with a quadrapod. Using a quadrapod, a diver can take several high- resolution color photos of a known dimension, thereby recording community changes over time. But Hellemn’s tech- nique has raised the bar several notches. JAMES A. COYER Department of Marine Biology University of Groningen, Haren, Netherlands

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Only National Geographic can provide insights into Islam that span nearly a century.

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From 1904 to 2001, from the fierce Afghan frontier in the days of Rudyard Kipling to the mosques and minarets of Mecca today, The World of Islam is a timely, evocative, chronological book that lifts the veil on all that is Islam.

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CONSERVATION

PEAT BOGS

Squish Goes an Ecosystem

With tree farming and peat harvesting, these wetlands can lose ground

4,

>

—_

\f

> i land you're walking on

ae — looks dry but your shoes are

. Ee, soon soggy, if it’s mossy and

ay dragonflies zoom about, you're ina peat bog.

Bogs are acid-rich, nutrient- poor wetlands where dead plants accumulate faster than they decompose and water

” stagnates. Few plants can sur vive in this ecosystem, so most bogs become choked with water-loving sphagnum moss. Bogs carpet both coastal and inland regions around the world but are mostly found in boreal North America, Europe, and Asia.

These pastoral pools in northern Scotland lie near Forsinard Nature Reserve, run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The bogs

here are termed blanket bogs because the peat blankets the hillsides as well as flat areas.

According to reserve manager Norrie Russell, some 5,000 people a year come to see black- throated divers (a loon species), black scoter ducks, and insects like the spectacular emperor moth (below).

Twenty years ago foresters began draining the bogs, pol- luting them with fertilizers, and planting trees, which had been nonexistent. The society is now turning 4,000 forested acres back into peatland.

Raised bogs—a different type, which grows in a dome above its original depression— have been harvested commer- cially for decades to provide peat for gardens and hearths.

> MorE ON OuR WEBSITE For a listing of resources and links related to bogs go to nationalgeo

| graphic.com/ngm/0202.

| AOL Keyword: NatGeoMag

ADRIAN DAVIES (ABOVE) AND JIM HALLETT, BOTH GBC NATURAL HISTORY UNIT

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + FEBRUARY 2002

ARCHAEOLOGY

Who Killed the Iceman?

New find raises questions about prehistoric mummy

A moistening spray mists the 5,000-year-old Iceman mummy at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy.

e spent some 5,000 years — the 11 years since his discovery nicknamed for the Otztal Alps

frozen in a mountain the Iceman mummy has been where he was found, didn’t

glacier on the Austro- examined from every possible freeze to death in a sudden snow Italian border before passing angle. But not until this past storm while tending sheep, as hikers discovered him, sprawled summer did those studying his some had suggested. Instead he in the melting snow, in 1991. still frozen body notice a crucial was killed, a victim of warfare, He now resides ina refrigerated —_ piece of evidence that dramati- murder, or human sacrifice.

room at a museum in Italy. Over cally rewrites his story: “Otzi,” X-rays reveal an arrowhead

buried deep in the Iceman’s left shoulder—an injury that could not possibly have been self-

inflicted (see continuing page, center left). The wound, visible as a small dark smudge beneath the mummy’s leathery skin (bot- tom left), had been overlooked

in all previous examinations. Though no arrow shaft pro- trudes from the wound and no blood marks the arrow’s entrance, it’s now clear that the Iceman was shot in the back. But who did it? And why? “There’s no way anyone can

‘Bolzano $0 “S F ae > Fa

ITALY

ever really know,” says archaeologist Johan Reinhard, a National Geographic Soci- ety explorer-in-residence, “It might have been murder. Or it might have been ritual sacrifice.” Reinhard knows mummies. Among the many he has discov- ered is the Inca “ice maiden,” a victim of sacrifice, on the frozen slopes of Peru’s Nevado Ampato in 1995, His experience studying mountain cultures in the Andes, the Himalaya, and elsewhere has convinced him that the [ceman’s death was not a random killing. “Look at where he died,” Rein- hard says (map, above). “It’s a prominent pass, between two of the highest peaks in the Otztal Alps. This is the kind of place where people from mountain cultures have traditionally made offerings to their mountain gods. We know that mountain worship was important in prehistoric Europe during the Bronze Age,” he says. “And there is good evi- dence that it may also have played a role earlier, in the Copper Age.”

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * FEBRUARY 2002

“ALONG WITH ALL THE GREAT MEMORIES HAS COME SOMETHING | THOUGHT I'D NEVER EXPERIENCE—

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What is VIOXX?

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VIOXX should be taken once a day. Your doctor will decide what dose of VIOXX you should take and how long you should take it. You may take VIOXX with of without food.

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Tell your doctor about all of the other medicines you are taking or plan to take while you are on VIOXX, even other medicines that you can get without a pre- scription. Your doctor may want to check that your medicines are working property together if you are taking other medicines such as:

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The side effects described above do not include all of the side effects reported with VIOXX. Do not rely on this leafiet alone for information about side effects. Your doctor or pharmacist can discuss with you a more complete list of side etfects. Any time you have a medical problem you think may be related to VIOXX, talk to your doctor.

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GEOGRAPHICA

Reinhard’s interpretation seems to answer questions about artifacts found with the mummy that have long puzzled experts. For example, breaking objects was a ceremonial practice in Neolithic Europe. This might explain the broken arrows lying near the mumnyy. The Iceman’s copper ax (middle right)—the oldest prehistoric ax in Europe with its bindings and handle intact—is also significant. Its copper had to have been mined, and mountains, as the source of valuable metals used to make tools, “were worshiped by miners throughout the world,” says Rein- hard. “This helps explain why the ax was left with the body after the killing.” Murderers would likely have taken something so useful

EDUARD EG:

with them. But people perform- ing a ritual might have left it for the Iceman’s use in the afterlife or as tribute to the gods. Another clue: The Iceman’s body was found in a naturally formed trench along the pass. Prior explanations had him taking shelter there from sud- den bad weather. “But the trench is not deep and is at a high point of the pass [above]. It would have been a poor place to sit out a storm,” explains i Reinhard. Perhaps, instead, ~~ the Iceman was buried there by whoever killed him, which would

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * FEBRUARY 2002

4 GARRET account for his body’s being so well preserved.

Reinhard’s ideas have not been met with enthusiasm by Euro- pean experts, including the y's caretaker, pathologist Eduard Egarter Vigl of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology. “The Iceman was hit by an arrow

from behind,” he says, suggesting that Otzi may have been fleeing from an attacker. Others main- tain that arrows aren’t efficient means of ritual killing and that no clear evidence of any other Copper Age sacrifice exists.

“They view the idea of human sacrifice as too sensational,” says Reinhard. “But they can’t refute what I’ve pointed out, and I believe my theory better explains the known facts.

“I know it’s controversial,” he admits. “But it’s time to reexam- ine the evidence from a different perspective. Let’s look at these artifacts not only relative to each other but also within social, sacred, and geographic contexts.”

For more resources and links, go online to nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0202.

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The Lady in the Yellow Hat

Maine islanders warmed by photo exhibit

my Toensing made many friends while photo- graphing Monhegan

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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC +« FEBRUARY 2002

resident whose dour expression in the article's opening spread embodied the island’s ambiva- lence about visitors. “It was rain- ing,” Amy recalls. “There was Frances in the same outfit she had

on in the article, the whole nine yards. She said, ‘Amy, the pic- tures are beautiful!” The exhibit stayed on Monhegan until October, then traveled to other Maine locations, including the governor's mansion in Augusta.

Provence, Texas?

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for our October 1998 perfume article, Robb Kendrick realized that the French region's hot, dry climate and alkaline soil were similar to the Texas Hill Country. He planted lavender on his 22

acre spread there and harvests it with help from his wife, Jeannie, and sons, Gus and Jeb. Buyers use lavender as an herb and in floral arrangements. “It doesn’t need water or fertil- izer, and deer don't like it,’ Robb says. “The only thing it lacks is the ability to harvest itself.”

Keepers of the Flame

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n 1909 we published a

two-part series, “The

Afghan Borderland” —the first, but far from the last, appearance of that troubled land in our magazine, accord- ing to a time line prepared by Society staff archivist Mark Jenkins. That sample of Geo- graphic history and other records of adventure, explora- tion, and science typify the

past

holdings of our archives, headed by Renee Braden (above, at right, with Mark and Cathy Hunter). The archives contain manuscript and memorabilia collections, the papers of past editors and Society officials, and oral his- tories and biographies. Local and international staff re this valuable record of the

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Ei

For people with type 2 diabetes

“By taking care of my diabetes, I take care of my family.”

“lve made the commitment for myself, but it’s also for my family. For my wife and my two beautiful daughters — they're everything to me. All | have to do is look at them, any one of them, and | find all the strength, all the reason, all the determination | need to take better care of myself.

“| was eating better, exercising more. But that still wasn't enough. So my doctor added Avandia. It makes my body more responsive to its own natural insulin, so | can control my blood sugar more effectively.

“So finally, with the help of Avandia, I'm controlling my type 2 diabetes, instead of the other way around. And while not everybody gets the same results, I've been able to keep my blood sugar down for just about a year now. That's the strength of doing things right.”

Avandia, along with diet and exercise, helps improve blood sugar control. It may be prescribed alone, with Glucophage” (metformin HC! tablets) or with sulfonylureas. When taking Avandia with a sulfonylurea, you may be at risk for low blood sugar. Ask your doctor whether you need to lower your sulfonylurea dosage.

Some people may experience tiredness, weight gain or swelling with Avandia.

Avandia in combination with insulin may increase the risk of serious heart problems. Because of this, talk to your doctor before using Avandia and insulin together. Avandia may cause fluid retention, or swelling, which could lead to or worsen heart failure, so tell your doctor if you have a history of these conditions. If you experience an unusually rapid increase in weight, swelling or shortness of breath while taking Avandia, talk to your doctor immediately. Avandia is not for everyone. If you have severe heart failure or active liver disease, Avandia is not recommended.

Also, blood tests to check for serious liver problems should be conducted before and during Avandia therapy. Tell your doctor if you have liver disease, or if you experience unexplained tiredness, stomach problems, dark urine or yellowing of the skin while taking Avandia. See important patient information on the following page.

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Patient Information about AVANDIA® (rosiglitazone maleate) 2 mg, 4 mg, and 8 mg Tablets

What is Avandia?

Avandia is one product in a class of prescription drugs called thiazolidinediones (thigh-a-zol-a-deen-die-owns) or TZDs. It is used to treat type 2 diabetes by helping the body use the insulin that it is already making. Avandia comes as pills that can be taken either once a day or twice a day to help improve blood sugar levels.

How does Avandia treat type 2 diabetes?

If you have type 2 diabetes, your body probably still pro- duces insulin but it is not able to use the insulin efficiently. Insulin is needed to allow sugar to be carried from the blood- stream into many cells of the body for energy. If insulin is not being used correctly, sugar does not enter the cells very well and builds up in the blood. If not controlled, the high blood sugar level can lead to serious medical prob- lems, including kidney damage, blindness and amputation. Avandia helps your body use insulin by making the cells more sensitive to insulin so that the sugar can enter the cell.

How quickly will Avandia begin to work?

Avandia begins to reduce blood sugar levels within 2 weeks. However, since Avandia works to address an important underlying cause of type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, it may take 8 to 12 weeks to see the full effect. If you do not respond adequately to your starting dose of Avandia, your physician may increase your daily dose to improve your blood sugar control.

How should I take Avandia?

Your doctor may tell you to take Avandia once a day or twice

a day (in the morning and evening). It can be taken with or

without meals. Food does not affect how Avandia works. To

help you remember to take Avandia, you may want to take it at the same time every day.

What if | miss a dose?

i india for

* As soon as you remember your missed dose, take one tablet anytime during the day.

* If you forget and go a whole day without taking a dose, don't try to make it up by adding another dose on the following day. Forget about the missed dose and simply follow your normal schedule.

If your doctor has prescribed Avandia for use twice a day:

* You should never take three doses on any single day in order to make up for a missed dose the day before.

Do | need to test my blood for sugar while using Avandia?

Yes, you should follow your doctor's instructions about your

at-home testing schedule.

Does Avandia cure type 2 diabetes?

Currently there is no cure for diabetes. The only way to avoid the effects of the disease is to maintain good blood sugar contro! by following your doctor's advice for diet, exercise, weight control, and medication. Avanaia, alone or in combination with other antidiabetic drugs (i.€., sulfonyl- ureas or metformin), may improve these other efforts by helping your body make better use of the insulin it already produces.

Can | take Avandia with other medications?

Avandia has been taken safely by people using other medi- cations, including other antidiabetic medications, birth control pills, warfarin (a blood thinner), Zantac® (ranitidine, an antiulcer product from GlaxoSmithKline), certain heart medications, and some cholesterol-lowering products. You should discuss with your doctor the most appropriate plan for you. If you are taking prescription or over-the-counter products for your diabetes or for conditions other than diabetes, be sure to tell your doctor. Sometimes a patient who is taking two antidiabetic medications each day can become irritable, lightheaded or excessively tired, Tell your doctor if this occurs; your blood sugar levels may be drop- ping too low, and the dose of your medication may need to be reduced.

What should | discuss with my doctor before taking Avandia?

Avandia in combination with insulin may increase the risk of serious heart problems. Because of this, talk to your doctor before using Avandia and insulin together. Avandia may cause fluid retention or swelling which could lead to or worsen heart failure, so tell your doctor if you have a history of these conditions. You should also talk to your doctor if you have liver problems, or if you are nursing, pregnant or thinking of becoming pregnant. If you are a premenopausal woman who is not ovulating, you should know that Avandia. therapy may result in the resumption of ovulation, which may increase your chances of becoming pregnant. Therefore, you may need to consider birth control options.

What are the possible side effects of Avandia?

Avandia was generally well tolerated in clinical trials. The most common side effects reported by people taking Avandia were upper respiratory infection (cold-like symp- toms) and headache. As with most other diabetes medica- tions, you may experience an increase in weight. You may also experience edema (swelling) and/or anemia (tired- ness). If you experience any swelling of your extremities (@.g., legs, ankles) or tiredness, notify your doctor. Talk to your doctor immediately if you experience edema, short- ness of breath, an unusually rapid increase in weight, or other symptoms of heart failure.

Who should not use Avandia?

You should not take Avandia if you are in the later stages of heart failure or if you have active liver disease. The follow- ing people should also not take Avandia: People with type 4 diabetes, people who experienced yellowing of the skin with Rezulin® (troglitazone, Parke-Davis), people who are allergic to Avandia or any of its components and people with diabetic ketoacidosis.

Why are laboratory tests recommended?

Your doctor may conduct blood tests to measure your blood sugar control. Blood tests to check for serious liver prob- lems should be conducted before starting Avandia, every 2 months during the first year, and periodically thereafter.

It is important that you call your doctor immediately if you experience unexplained symptoms of nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, tiredness, anorexia, dark urine, or yellowing of the skin.

How should | store Avandia?

Avandia should be stored at room temperature in a child- proof container out of the reach of children. Store Avandia in its original container.

J ciaxosmithwiine

nationalgeographic.com

Zoom In on Photographs

Karen Kasmauski captured this minutes-old child in Bangladesh for her coverage of global disease. With thou-

sands of photos shot for each story and only a handful pub- lished, it’s worthwhile to catch the Zoom Ins. Click on any feature story to find a selec- tion of these images—and the details on how the photogra- phers got them—at

HOMEWORK HELP Our best online resources on one handy webpage: nationalgeographic.com, education/homework

DESTINATION GUIDE Find maps, tips, and more for travel at nationalgeo Sraphic.com/destinations

BREAKING NEWS Get the latest world news at nationalgeographic ,com/news

PHOTO OF THE DAY Get your daily photo fix at nationalgeographic.com/ photography/today

OMASZ TOMASZEWSKI

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| online Map Machine serves up maps of just about any place on Earth in seconds. From San Francisco (above) to Santiago de Cuba, see cities and more in myriad ways: satellite views, antique panoramas, and others. rtionalg:

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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + FEBRUARY 2002

~ Nationa Geographic I'V

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CHANNEL

For the Love of Animals

Valentine’s week a mar- athon of programs celebrates the bonds between humans and animals. One feature, The Tale of Three Chimps, looks at how people view chimpanzees

s wild animals, performers,

JAMES BALOG, STONE and pets. The show follows the fate of three chimp brothers

raised in a New Zealand circus. One sta Another lives in a family home.

with the circus.

The youngest finds refuge in a wildlife orphanage in Zambi

Cowboys

Ranch hands in Brazil’s

Pantanal wetlands don’t stop at riding and roping. They wade piranha-thick waters, hunt jaguars that threaten their stock, and lead huge cattle drives to outrace seasonal floods. Pantanal Cowboys presents the dangerous and endan- gered lifestyle of those who ride Brazil’s floodplains.

Programming information ac

te at press time; consult local listings or

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * FEBRUARY 2002

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The foals of the Indian wild ass, or khur, are born during the rainy season, when renewed vegetation provides the best nourishment for mares. Here, a young foal, startled by a territorial stallion, escapes while its mother follows. The two forma tight unit for a year or more until the next foal is born. In September the rains end, and for nine months small groups cross the sun-baked Little Rann looking for scarce grasses and halophytes to eat. Decades ago, the Indian wild ass population fell to under 500. Though numbers have since increased, it is still vulnerable to

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THINGS YOU WANT TO KNOW

THE ANSWER PLACE Our Research Correspondence

staff responds to questions from curlous readers.

How did Great Slave Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories get its name?

A Great Slave Lake is named for a tribe of Native Americans who resided on its shores. They lived on fish and stayed close to home. To their aggressive neighbors, the Cree, they seemed servile and were called awonak, or slaves. Explorer Peter Pond traded with the Cree and followed their lead, using the label Slave Lake on his 1785 map, then Great Slave Lake on the 1790 version.

Why would male emperor penguins elect to stand on the outer ring of a huddle?

A Each penguin takes his turn on the outside of the huddle,

TELL US

Why is a sidewalk in Beijing, China, a good place for this man to practice calligraphy? Hint: His char- acters could be called into question.

Think you know the ansv Go online to

and test yourself, or read it here in next month's issue.

January answer The wall is

of hand-rolled Cuban cigars neatly stacked and

2ady to be packaged at a factory in Havana

mac

AskUs

but he doesn't have to brave the Antarctic winds for long. Males huddle to conserve heat during the 65 days it takes

to incubate their eggs. (The females, meanwhile, are feed ing far offshore.) When a pen guin on the windward edge of the huddle gets cold, he peels off and moves to the leeward side of the mass, balancing his egg on his feet under a fold of skin. Eventually each penguin gets his chance to warm up in the center. Huddles can cut a Penguin's heat loss in half

How do smell and color affect the taste of food? A Although the tongue's taste buds sense the basics—sweet, salt, sour, and bitter—our sense of smell, thousands of times more sensitive, brings in the subtleties. A blindfolded person with nostrils pinched will likely find it difficult to tell a sliver of apple from one of raw

potato or even onion, Little sci entific research has been done on color’s effects, if any, on the taste of food, but according to restaurant designers, warm tints—oranges, reds—stimulate appetite, while the opposite is true for shades of blue.

What is the largest lobster ever caught? A The biggest on record is an American lobster trapped off Nova Scotia, Canada, on Feb- ruary 11, 1977, that weighed 44 pounds 6 ounces and was three feet six inches long from the end of the tail fan to the tip of the large claw. It was sold to a New York restaurateur.

MORE INFORMATION

Send questions to Ask Us, National Geographic Magazine, PO Box 96095, Washington, DC 20090-6095 or via the Intemet to ngsaskus@national geographic.com. Include name, address, and daytime phone number.

MICHAEL YAMASHITA

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + FEBRUARY 2002

FIRST IN A SERIES

Challenges ! for Humanity

By Jimmy Carter

URS IS AN AGE of complexity, contradiction, and challenge. As we enter the 21st century, we have wealth and technol- ogy unmatched in human

ta "experience, and the fortunate few who Live i in the world’s developed nations are almost inevitably propelled toward a future enriched by advances in computers, communi- cation, and life sciences.

But for most of the world’s people the glit- tering opportunities of the new century are beyond reach. There are more than six billion of us on Earth, and by 2100 we may number ten billion. Most will live in urban centers, and many are likely to live short and impover- ished lives, lacking the wealth or awareness to address problems of life in crowded cities: dis- ease, inadequate food, and unsafe water.

We face tremendous challenges as popula- tions soar, mostly in the poorer nations, and as consumption increases in the industrialized world. We must find ways to lessen the burden on Earth’s resources, and we must encourage better stewardship of the planet so that all of us live in a clean and productive environment. The decisions we make in the decades to come will affect not only all of human civilization but also the fate of thousands of species representing millions of years of evolution.

\ 1 i ne

All too often our fondest expectations are frustrated. Louis Pasteur, father of the science of microbiology and a key figure in the devel- opment of vaccines in the 1880s, suggested that humans had the power “to make parasitic maladies disappear from the face of the globe.” Yet since then hundreds of millions of people have died of infectious diseases— tuberculosis, malaria, AIDS, dengue, smallpox, cholera, plague, influenza, and scores of others. And after 30 years of discoveries in molecular biology—including DNA cloning, the sequenc- ing of the human genome, and stunning new developments in techniques for human stem- cell research—we still face the daily tragedy of preventable human illnesses, some ancient and others new, unpredicted, and even more virulent.

How can we heal our planet and achieve an Earth that nurtures humanity and nature in all their diversity? As individuals we can act to re- duce our risk of exposure to disease and extend care to others. As communities and as nations we can educate our citizens, legislate ethically and wisely, and support organizations that conduct research and help those who are ill.

Perhaps the most important challenge for the new century is to share wealth, opportu- nities, and responsibilities between the rich and the poor—for a world where the chasm between rich and poor grows wider will be

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

Over the next year NATIONAL GEO- GRAPHIC will pre- sent a four-part series on global challenges. “War on Disease” begins on page 4. Look for stories on food safety and modifi- cation in May.

Long concerned with human rights issues, former U.S. President Carter meets African dancers in 1989,

neither stable nor secure. So far we have not made enough of a commitment to this goal. Nearly a billion people are illiterate. More than half the world’s people have little or no health care and less than two dollars a day for food, clothing, and shelter. Some 1.3 billion live on less than one dollar a day. At the same time, the average household income of an American family is more than $55,000 a year, with much of the industrialized world enjoy- ing the same, and in some cases an even higher, standard of material blessings.

The best measurement of a nation’s wealth is its gross national product (GNP)—the total output of goods and services. The nations of the European Union have set a public goal of sharing four-tenths of one percent of their GNP with the developing world. But the United States and most other rich nations fall far short of this goal. Our contribution must increase greatly if we are to face future challenges to humanity with any real hope of success.

A partial answer to the problem lies in a growing number of private efforts, some quite small. For instance, during the past 20 years the Carter Center has focused more than half its effort and resources on health care in Africa and Latin America. Experts have helped us identify some of the diseases we can hope to eradicate. One is caused by a parasite called

CHALLENGES FOR HUMANITY

ELI REED, MAGNUM PHOTOS

guinea worm. When our guinea worm pro- gram started, more than 3.5 million people had this painful, debilitating disease, mostly in remote parts of Africa where only contami- nated water is available to drink. We have now reduced this number by 98 percent. Only 70,000 people remain affected—almost all of them in the war zone of southern Sudan—and we are working hard to address their plight. In our fight against river blindness, another tropical disease, we have traveled to villages to treat more than seven million people each year—none of whom now will face possible blindness from the bite of a little black fly. The success of these efforts reaffirms my faith that this is a time not for despair but for a global commitment to make the most of our scientific knowledge to address the prob- lems of our age. Over the next year NATIONAL Geocrapnic will highlight challenges for humanity in the 21st century: the global fight to control disease, to make our food safe and our water clean, to live together fruitfully in megacities. The problems may seem insur- mountable, but they are not. We have the tools; we have brilliant, dedicated people to find answers. All we need is a sense of sharing and the will to change. The will can grow from understanding. Once we understand, we can care, and once we care, we can change. Oo

Medics train for quarantine situations at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Their scrub-down chemicals will kill the world’s most feared microbes, including smallpox and Ebola.

Just a few years ago medicine seemed to be winning the fight against disease. But now old adversaries are coming lope ar-satemelanmberccasleyers are emerging, exposing us

, all to serious, sometimes unexpected, threats.

By Rick Weiss Photographs by Karen Kasmauski

5

Shared Concerns

An international border is no barrier to disease. As people move back and forth between the Mexican city of Mexicali, at right, and the U.S. town of Calexico, at left, to look for work, visit

relatives, or do business, disease-producing microorganisms can easily hitch a ride. Migrants

{pain i eee So

from Mexico, who may never have seen a doctor in their lives, can import diseases that have been almost eradicated in the U.S. Likewise, travelers to Mexico can carry diseases to remote areas that have never before experienced them. The result is the same: a public health problem.

Nutrition makes a big difference to tiny patients at a research hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Admitted with diarrhea, all weighed 50 percent below the norm for their age. Two recent arriv-

als are still scrawny, but the baby on the right is ready to go home after three weeks of eating

locally available, calorie-rich foods. Without such intervention many severely malnourished children succumb to disease. With half its babies born underweight, Bangladesh—like many

struggling nations—has begun to educate women about nutrition.

T WAS HoT. Swamps stretched before him in every direction. And there were mosquitoes. Lots of mosquitoes. Those were the things Steven Wiersma noticed first as he stepped out of his car last summer in rural Sirmans, Florida. Everything was typical Florida —except for the one thing that Wiersma, the state’s chief epidemiologist, had come to investigate.

The guts of those swarming mosquitoes, Wiersma had recently learned, were filled with a virus from a far-off land—a virus that had never inhabited the Western Hemisphere until 1999 but which had taken an instant liking to it. That virus—named for its homeland, the West Nile district of Uganda—had found the

United States to be a bountiful place. Plenty of

birds to live and breed in. And plenty of mos- quitoes to spread the virus from bird to bird— or as was beginning to happen with somewhat alarming regularity, from birds to people. People like 73-year-old Seymore Carruthers of Sirmans, who lay in a coma with encepha- litis in a Tallahassee hospital that week because

tuded tt i Sant

he'd been bitten by one of those infected mos- quitoes. It was just about the farthest south in the continental U.S. the virus had ventured since arriving in New York State two years ear- lier. And it was ominous evidence that the bug was settling into the nation’s Sunbelt, home to so many mosquitoes and to so many of the nation’s elderly—least capable of fighting off infection by the virus.

Looking around the neighborhood, Wiersma could easily see how Carruthers had been felled. Mosquitoes breed in stagnant water, and there was plenty of it around—a direct result of more people and more of their trappings. In addition to the area’s natural swamps there were tarpaulins draped over farm and construction equipment, puckered with little pockets of rainwater. Birdbaths. Abandoned buckets in yards. Every stray puddle teemed with millions of mosquito larvae. “Where these people live, mosquito bites are part of daily life,” Wiersma says. “It hasn’t always mattered so much. But it’s mattering more and more.”

The recent and wholly unanticipated erup- tion of West Nile fever in the United States has

Data from a deer mouse, trapped temporarily, will help scientists in New Mexico understand a han- tavirus. Viral particles excreted by infected mice can cause respiratory failure if breathed in by humans. In the summer of 2000, New York City used chick- ens to determine the arrival of the West Nile virus. Antibodies in blood drawn weekly (below left) indi- cated that an infected mosquito had bitten a bird.

been a sobering experience for public health officials, who estimate the virus has already infected tens of thousands of Americans, sick- ening more than 2,000 and killing about a dozen. Far more sobering, however, is that West Nile pales in comparison with the many more ferocious infectious diseases—including those delivered intentionally by terrorists— emerging and reemerging around the globe. Ebola is one familiar example, though that virus, it turns out, is too deadly for its own good; it kills its human victims so fast it has little opportunity to transfer from person to person and so is unlikely ever to grow into a full-fledged pandemic. But other ailments— some famous, some obscure—pose increas- ingly serious hazards. The mosquito-borne viruses that cause fatal dengue hemorrhagic fever and its sister disease, yellow fever—both supposedly vanquished by the 1940s—are again resident through much of South and Central America, and dengue has recently made inroads into the Caribbean and the southern United States. And with more people on the planet providing more places for mos- quitoes to breed, the stage is set for a public health disaster of hemispheric proportions. Tuberculosis has grown coldly resistant to the effects of modern antibiotics in the former Soviet Union and other regions of the world. With its ease of transmission by invisible

WAR ON DISEASE

respiratory droplets and its close association with HIV, TB is in an excellent position to wreak global havoc in the new millennium. And malaria, which already kills an estimated 1.2 million people annually—more than half of them children—has grown similarly resist- ant to standard medicines.

The list goes on: Rift Valley fever, hanta- virus, cholera. At least 20 major maladies have reemerged in novel, more deadly, or drug- resistant forms in the past 25 years. Worldwide, scientists have discovered at least 30 previously unknown human diseases for which no cure exists, such as Marburg disease and AIDS.

That’s a humbling reality given that just a couple of decades ago experts declared that many infectious diseases were on the brink of extinction. Improved sanitation, mosquito control, global vaccination, and modern anti- biotics appeared to have won the war, and self- assuredness spawned complacency. Flush with our early successes against them, we concluded that microbes were no competition for our big human brains. We were wrong.

Largely unnoticed the world was changing. In developing nations, people were hacking their way into previously inaccessible areas, where a menacing menagerie of bacteria and viruses skulked about, hungry for new warm- blooded hosts. Third World metropolises grew increasingly crowded, overwhelming sewage

11

Six maladies alone account for 90 percent of

the deaths from infectious diseases worldwide.

Spread in different ways and influenced by dif- ferent factors, they continue to resist control. Aggravating social, economic, and political

Prone to mutate, influenza viruses continually appear in different forms, requiring the production of a new vaccine each flu season. In some years the symptoms are mild; in others they can be lethal. Three episodes were especially virulent: the influ- enza pandemic in 1918-19, the Asian flu in 1957-58, and the Hong Kong flu in 1968-69.

Passed on through bodily fluids, human immuno- deficiency virus, or HIV, almost invariably leaves the body defenseless against the infections that define full-blown acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS. Sub-Saharan Africa, with one-tenth of

the world’s population, has more than 70 percent

of all HIV cases.

Diarrheal Diseases

Waterborne bacteria, viruses, and parasites pro- duce about four billion cases of diarrhea a year. Those at highest risk include the 1.1 billion people lacking access to safe drinking water and the

2.4 billion without adequate sanitation facilities. Cholera, an acute diarrheal disease, claims more than 5,000 lives a year.

Tuberculosis

Propelled by a cough or sneeze from an infected person, tuberculosis bacteria can begin to grow in the lungs and throat of anyone who breathes them in. Drugs discovered in the 1940s beat back the dis- ease, but the bacteria have recently begun to de- velop resistance, and tuberculosis has reappeared with a vengeance.

ELETaE

Caused by microscopic parasites transmitted by

r the bites of infected mosquitoes, malaria attacks red blood cells. Global warming has expanded the range of malaria-carrying mosquitoes, putting more than 40 percent of the world’s population at risk. In addition, warmer weather makes mosquitoes breed faster and bite more often.

instability, these diseases have increasingly become global security threats. Large, densely populated cities in developing countries, where most of the world’s people now live, are especially vulnerable.

Outbreaks

I Widespread

fl Regional

We Local

lM Sporadic Negligible or

no surveillance NG MAPS

Cholera Cases ME More than 1,500 Bi 1,001-1,500

(@ 501-1,000

_ 1-500

A highly contagious viral disease that can lead to pneumonia or encephalitis, measles was an inevi- table rite of childhood until an effective vaccine became available in 1963. Still striking more than 30 million a year and killing some 900,000, it is the world’s leading cause of vaccine-preventable death in children.

Number of cases per 100,000 iB More than 100 1-100 mo a) No surveillance

and water systems and providing a microbial mixing bowl for the creation of new diseases. Wars in nations least able to afford them spawned immense human migrations and ref- 2 ugee settlements with little or no sanitation or 3 medical care. And changing patterns of tem- a perature and rainfall allowed disease-carrying insects to extend their range.

“The world definitely favors the bugs; mi- crobes have the advantage,” says Jim Hughes, Director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. “There are a lot

iy more of them than us. Their generation time is minutes instead of years. They evolve rapidly.

And, of course, we aid and abet them in many ways—by travel, commerce in foodstuffs, transportation of animals, and our abuse and overuse of antibiotics. We're playing right into their hands.”

LAGUES ARE NOT NeW to humanity, of a Bi ik course. Smallpox thrived long before the Egyptian pharaohs, and it contin- ued to kill one-third of those it struck until, after a heroic international vaccination effort, the last human was afflicted in 1978 and the disease officially eradicated in 1980, In its final century on Earth, smallpox killed more

than half a billion people. la bi The plague of the 14th century, known as

the Black Death, wiped out about a fourth of Europe's population in just four years—a tidal wave of death almost unimaginable today. Ignorant of its cause and paranoid of the air itself, medieval society quickly descended into panic and mayhem.

Then came the discovery of the New World,

ii | ii offering microbes a new and deadly wind-

fall. After Columbus first dropped anchor in the West Indies, the native population of the Americas declined drastically, largely from dis- eases that arrived on European vessels, many of them carrying African slaves. And as recently as 1918-19 the great global influenza pandemic left at least 20 million dead. i ky By comparison, World War I, fought between

1914 and 1918, claimed 8.5 million casualties. In many respects microbes have it even eas-

ier today. With modern technology, centralized systems of food and water distribution in

developed nations tend to amplify the impact

of otherwise modest microbial blooms. When

SOURCE: MAPS ADAPTED F/I0M WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION DATA:

ENART ADAPTED PROM 1909 DATA: WHO

Paiaiald ee ea temas

CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL

Sanitation | Very important

Availability of health

services

Use of prevention

strategies Health surveillance

system Climate change

Use of treatment strategies Availability of effective vaccines Nutrition

world. To understand what made that flu so deadly and

what can be done to keep similar strains from spread- ing now, Taubenberger’s lab is trying to reconstruct the gene sequence of the virus using fragments of RNA from tissue samples (left) preserved at the institute since 1918.

Army recruits stricken with influenza during the great pandemic of 1918-19 fill a gymnasium at lowa State University (top). “The U.S. lost about 100,000 soldiers in World War |. Of those, 43,000 died of the flu,” says Jeffery Taubenberger, a division chief at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rock- ville, Maryland. “You'd have to go back to the Black Death to reach that level of mortal- ity in a single outbreak.”

The pandemic killed at least

New strains of influenza usually arise in countries like China (below), where the virus can move among pigs and birds kept close to their human owners. With each relocation the virus’s genes can change just enough to present a health risk the fol- lowing flu season.

20 million people around the

UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES, IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, AMES (TOP)

14 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

Lake Michigan became contaminated with the intestinal bug Cryptosporidium in 1993, hun- dreds of thousands of residents in Milwaukee were infected. When one U.S. fast-food chain sold undercooked hamburgers tainted with a virulent strain of E. coli bacteria in the same year, hundreds of children fell ill, and several died. And far-flung outbreaks of severe diar- theal disease have been traced to apparently healthful seed sprouts that were grown from contaminated seeds and then widely distrib- uted from a single source. In the worst case, white radish was implicated in a Japanese E. coli outbreak that sickened about 10,000 and killed 11 in the summer of 1996.

1's BAD ENOUGH that in today’s crowded

and interconnected world small out-

breaks can blossom inadvertently into

huge epidemics. Equally worrisome, how- ever, is the fact that terrorists can take advantage of that modern vulnerability and intentionally sow the seeds of a devastating disease.

A bioterrorism attack, as difficult to counter as almost any act of war, combines the best of microbial lethality and human ingenuity. Bil- lions of infectious particles can be stored in a small vial, much easier to smuggle into a coun- try than a nuclear device. Computer models have shown that an intentional outbreak of smallpox (public health officials report that some samples of the smallpox virus, stored for research after the disease was eradicated, are now unaccounted for) could spread uncontrol- lably almost before officials could take action to contain it. And as the U.S. learned firsthand in October, even a noncontagious disease like anthrax can wreak enormous havoc if it finds its way into the nation’s mail system.

To a terrorist perhaps the most attractive feature of a plague is its fantastic capacity to create social unrest and political instability. “Infectious agents have the potential to trigger panic and fear like no other weapon,” says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota—and an epidemi- ologist with a worldwide reputation for his disease-sleuthing skills. “It’s horrible to be eaten from without by a lion or something, but it’s equally horrible to be eaten from the inside out by some terrible bug and to see that going on all around you. It’s a very primal fear.”

WAR ON DISEASE

Bioterrorism was already a matter of height- ened concern when planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sep- tember 11. The CDC immediately warned U.S. public health agencies to be on the lookout for “unusual disease patterns associated with the events of September 11,” a chilling hint of fear that the country might be under biological attack. A biowarfare unit from the CDC and a military team specially trained in disease detection were rushed to New York. As part of the security crackdown that followed the hijack- ings, federal officials temporarily grounded the nation’s fleet of 3,500 crop duster airplanes, which they feared might be used to release a cloud of deadly microbes. When anthrax attacks did materialize a few weeks later, billions of dollars in resources were quickly redirected to bioterror defense.

And yet the recent emphasis on bioterror- ism obscures a more pedestrian but equally important truth about infectious diseases: Even without the element of intentional terror, diseases are a huge source of human suffering —and a tremendously destabilizing force. Nearly half of the world’s premature deaths (defined as deaths under the age of 45) are caused by infectious diseases. Some 30 mil- lion infants in developing countries remain unprotected by the lifesaving childhood vac- cines that in the rest of the world are admin- istered routinely; a million die each year from measles alone. It may not be obvious in the healthier nations, but from a microbe’s point of view the world today—even with modern antibiotics and fancy vaccines—remains a virtual smorgasbord. With the recent reemer- gence of some of these diseases in richer nations, there is a growing recognition that no nation is an island,

“The lesson of West Nile is that any country is vulnerable,” says David Heymann, execu- tive director of communicable diseases at the World Health Organization in Geneva. “Coun- tries have to realize that infectious diseases, regardless of their origins, can travel widely and affect anyone.” No nation, no matter how rich or seemingly protected, can be assured of a healthy and peaceful future as long as any nation is still an active breeding ground for the world’s many and varied scourges.

Encouragingly, that reality is sinking in. A 1999 CIA report,an (Continued on page 26)

15

Sick with tuberculosis, inmates at a Siberian prison wash down their medicine with milk (below). Because incomplete or interrupted treatment can allow the TB bacteria to strengthen their

defenses against first-line

drugs, masked health care workers watch to make sure every tablet is taken. Multi- drug-resistant tuberculosis, MDR-TB, is more difficult and

costly to cure and kills many who have no access to mod- ern medical facilities.

Until their treatment takes hold, TB patients have little contact with healthy prison- ers like Grigory Morozov, saying good-bye to his wife, Olga (right), after a conjugal visit. “Of course I’m worried

about getting TB and passing

it on to my daughter,” says

Olga. “| get tested every

“TB can become drug-resistant in prisons, when inmates fail to take all their medicine or when they’re released before completing

treatment.”

—PHOTOGRAPHER KAREN KASMAUSKI

three months, and so far

I'm fine.”

Tuberculosis is more likely to be spread by the prisoners themselves if they are released while still con- tagious. No longer quaran- tined or compelled to take their medicine, they are likely to infect an average of ten to fifteen new victims a year.

With one-third of humanity now carriers of tuberculosis, the disease has become everyone's problem. Each year the U.S. Public Health Service screens the estimated 200,000 people caught trying to enter the country illegally, including a man being x-rayed in El Centro, Califor- nia (above left). Some two million more cross the border undetected—and untested.

Nature provides the only plumbing for a pondside outhouse in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Crowded with people who have moved from the countryside, such urban neighborhoods have public faucets that deliver drinking water, but residents often bathe, wash clothes, and swim in the

witches’ brews of contagion that swirl around their homes. With the global consumption of fresh water doubling every 20 years, many other countries will surely join Bangladesh in struggling to supply even the minimum amount needed to keep their citizens healthy.

On the alert at Water Country USA in Williamsburg, Vir- ginia, Brooke Abbitt tests the amount of chlorine in a water sample from the wave pool (left). Chlorine at the proper

level disinfects the pool after

fecal accidents.

Cholera plagues Bangla- desh, especially around the spring and summer mon- soons, which flood much of the country. People who still

get their drinking water from the lakes and ponds in rural areas are the most suscepti- ble, but they are now begin- ning to practice a recently devised method of protec- tion. Folding clean, dry sari material several times (below) and placing it over the mouth of a jug before collecting water creates a barrier against plankton to which the cholera bacteria are attached.

“Many infectious diseases have

a water connec- tion, but often there’s an easy solution that will stop people from

getting sick.”

—KAREN KASMAUSKI

Improved agricultural

hygiene can help stop the transmission of intestinal bugs internationally. When more than 2,000 people in the U.S. and Canada fell ill from the cyclospora parasite car- ried by Guatemalan raspber- ries in the late 1990s, suppliers cleaned up their operations. New wells now deliver clean water to the fields, and pickers begin work (above) only after washing their hands. “Farms are care- fully reviewed by inspectors on a regular basis,” says Rob- ert Klein, a research director from the U.S. Centers for Dis- ease Control and Prevention who helped implement safety measures. “It all seems to be working. There haven't been any subsequent outbreaks.”

Taking Precautions

Day's first light in Niger finds a family of cattle herders still asleep under a net meant to keep away the mosquitoes whose bites transmit malaria. These people have few possessions, yet

they recognize the importance of owning such simple, effective protection. Of the four species

of malaria parasites that infect humans, the commonest in Africa is the most deadly. In addi- tion, malaria has become increasingly resistant to chloroquine, the drug used for decades to treat it. The disease kills more than a million people a year worldwide, mostly children.

Close Encounters

The incidence of Lyme dis-

ease, transmitted by the bite of the blacklegged tick, has risen significantly in the wooded suburbs of the north- eastern U.S. in the past few decades. Monitoring the tick population for the state of Connecticut, entomologist Kirby Stafford counts nymphs on a cloth he dragged along the shady edge of a backyard in Westport (left).

During part of the cycle that perpetuates Lyme dis- ease, adult ticks feed on deer. More deer mean more ticks and more illness. “In 1896, it's estimated, there were 12 deer in Connecticut,” says Stafford. “The latest figure is more than 76,000.”

Bitten by a sand fly carry- ing the leishmania parasite, a Guatemalan subsistence

farmer bears lesions

“People want forests around their houses

in Connecticut, so they're building up the trees. It’s deer heaven now, and there are ticks

everywhere.”

—KAREN KASMAUSKI

characteristic of infection (left). If the disease is not treated, such lesions can take

months or years to heal and result in permanent scarring. Economic necessity and political pressures send more and more campesinos into sand fly territory, the untouched rain forest in the country’s north. Following an age-old rhythm, farmers from the village of Tierra Blanca in the Petén have abandoned their exhausted fields and slashed-and-burned trees (above) to begin planting their crops anew. In other areas of the forest the govern- ment has resettled people dis- placed by the country’s long civil war. Their homes, built in the shadow of the forest, put whole families in jeopardy.

te vA

The watchword is “surveillance,” and it is the

(Continued from page 15) unclassified version of which was released in 2000, for the first time labeled global disease as a national security threat, elevating microbes to a level of political usually accorded nuclear warheads. Also in 2000, the United Nations Security Council convened a meeting to discuss the security threat of AIDS, the council’s first meeting devoted to a health issue.

It’s an important, even revolutionary, insight: Nations can enhance their own stability by taming diseases abroad. The catch is that public health improvements are difficult to implement in countries that are politically unstable or at war, as many of the world’s most plague-afflicted nations are today.

The tale of Bonzali Katanga offers a tragic case in point. Katanga was the sole public health officer for the town of Durba in civil- war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1998. The country’s central government was a shambles, and Katanga’s district was held by rebels. When men started dying by the dozens in the local gold mine, Katanga suspected Ebola or perhaps Marburg disease, caused by

concern

a similarly destructive virus. For months he tried desperately to raise the alarm, sending repeated radio messages to his superiors in the provincial capital of Kisangani while doing what little he could for his hemorrhaging patients. It took more than four months for officials to respond, and by the time they got there, Katanga was dead too. They found a vial of his blood in the refrigerator, which he had left to aid their investigation. Researchers later determined that it contained the deadly Mar- burg virus, which he’d contracted from the miners he had cared for until his own demise.

Katanga’s death was the worst kind of proof that political instability and disease go hand in hand, an American doctor who knew him said later, shaking with anger and grief. “I consider him a casualty of war.”

Ironically, Bonzali Katanga was doing exactly what global health officials say needs to be done if emerging diseases are to be con- trolled. He was on the ground, keeping his eyes open, and alerting authorities to anything that appeared to be infectiously amiss.

The watchword is “surveillance,” and it is

__linchpin in

ERADICATION EFFORTS Blinded by smallpox half a lifetime ago, a man in Niger is checked for trachoma (right). A global vaccination bs campaign against smallpox, launched in 1967, eliminated the disease by 1980.

Spread by water, the disease caused by guinea worms will likely disappear soon, after a decade-long drive encouraging the use of water filters in endemic areas. A farmer getting treatment in Niger may be among the last cases.

the linchpin in the battle against emerging diseases. It need not be complicated or high- tech. When the cryptosporidiosis outbreak hit Milwaukee in 1993, it took officials many days to recognize they had a problem on their hands. The causative organism was not one they tested for routinely. And the foremost symptom of infection—severe diarrhea—was not the kind of thing people typically called their doctors about, at least not at first.

After the epidemic was brought under con- trol, health officials conducted a retrospective study to see how they might have picked up on it sooner. The very best and earliest indication of trouble, they found, had been a vast increase in sales of over-the-counter antidiarrheal medicines—a simple sales spike that went unnoticed because no one was looking for it.

Milwaukee and other cities caught on. Now, for example, the New York City department of health has an arrangement with the Rite-Aid drugstore chain to receive weekly antidiarrheal sales data. In New Mexico, public health offi- cials are starting to tally symptoms of people in emergency rooms and are using computers to look for groups of symptoms that might indi- cate the spread of a disease through the com- munity several days before microbial culture results begin to yield clues.

But there’s a place for high-tech surveillance as well. In perhaps the best example, scientists

WAR ON DISEASE

at 110 centers around the world collect samples of the influenza virus from patients each winter and conduct sophisticated genetic tests on those viruses, which mutate continually from year to year. The scientists pool this infor- mation to predict which strain will dominate in the upcoming year, and vaccine companies rush to make new batches of exactly the right vaccine just in time for the next flu season.

“It’s an amazing and heroic effort that en- ables the pharmaceutical companies to make very effective vaccines,” says Barry Bloom, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. “Our best protection is to know what’s coming. With flu we’re doing an astonishingly good job.”

While vaccines are by far the most effective and cost-efficient weapons in the war against infectious diseases, precious little money is being spent on the development of new ones today, and vaccines for HIV, TB, and malaria remain elusive. Again, cooperation is required. For inspiration one need look no further than the current campaign against polio.

Thanks to an enormous international effort, polio may be eradicated as early as 2005. To accomplish that goal, countless dedicated health workers have been trekking into every village in the developing world and squeezing lifesaving drops of vaccine into the mouth of every child they can find.

The scale of the effort is almost beyond

27

Safely suited up, an airborne evacuation team from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) practices a rescue in Martinsburg, West Virginia. USAMRIID researchers devise protective strategies for both U.S. military personnel and civilians, and they

can protect medical researchers in the field who might come in contact with any of the world’s worst infectious agents—whether occurring naturally or spread intentionally In a real emergency the team would place a patient in a self-contained litter for transport.

comprehension. During a series of National Immunization Days over the past several years, almost two billion children have been inocu- lated worldwide. Just in 2000, 550 million children—one-tenth of the world’s population and almost 85 percent of its youth—received vaccinations, and in January 2001 India inocu- lated 152 million children in a single week.

The campaign has brought out the best in humanity, with entire wars suspended at times to allow health workers safe passage. In July 2001 the United Nations asked all warring parties in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to observe a cease-fire as part of the vaccination effort. Despite sporadic fighting and power outages, 11 million chil- dren were inoculated. And in a striking dis- play of antimicrobial solidarity, Sierra Leone’s president and his chief rebel rival posed for photographs together several years ago in the heat of that country’s bloody civil war. They were mortal enemies, but they had a common cause that day, emblazoned on the T-shirts they both wore. “Kick Polio Out of Africa,” the shirts declared.

HERE IS NO VACCINE against West Nile virus, and none was under devel- opment while the disease was still ensconced in Africa. But now that it is racing through the United States, the U.S. government has started financing such an ef- fort. And curiously, if it works, Americans will owe their thanks to a poor villager from Africa. His name was Asibi. He lived in Ghana and came down with yellow fever in 1927. Scien- tists there who were studying yellow fever. close viral relative of West Nile—isolated some of the yellow fever virus from Asibi’s blood and cultivated it in laboratory dishes for years, first on a diet of mouse embryo cells and later on chicken embryo cells and eggs. The virus that survived this intensive dietary regimen be- came too weakened to cause disease, but when injected as a vaccine into healthy people, the virus stimulated the human immune system enough to protect the recipients of the vaccine against future yellow fever infections.

a

That so-called 17D strain of yellow fever virus has since been injected into the arms of 300 million people, shielding them from the

Two drops deliver a dose of oral polio vaccine to a child at a Dhaka clinic during one of Bangladesh’s periodic National Immunization Days. A porter takes coolers of the vaccine to a village (below left) during a sub- sequent door-to-door search for children still needing protection from this crip- pling, sometimes fatal, dis- ease. Such diligence should soon eradicate its last ves- tiges, saving future genera- tions from untold misery.

mosquito-borne killer. Now scientists at a bio- technology firm in Massachusetts are using genetic engineering techniques to redecorate the 17D virus with a new molecular coating— one that will prime the immune system not against yellow fever but against West Nile.

The approach could be a metaphor for what it will take for humankind to stay ahead of its infectious foes. Just as microbes keep rearrang- ing their old genomes to come up with new ways to overcome our defenses, we humans will have to draw upon everything we've ever inherited or learned—from precolonial jungle medicine to genetic engineering—if we are to stay ahead in the evolutionary arms race.

In some cases it will require incredibly so- phisticated medicines, like some of those now in use to lessen the symptoms of HIV/AIDS. But more often than we once thought, simple solutions will work best. About 25 percent of childhood malaria deaths could be prevented tomorrow if children in affected areas simply slept under mosquito nets treated with insecti- cide. Cost: about five dollars a year per child.

Indeed, says Paul Ewald, a professor of biol- ogy at Amherst College, we can learn some- thing about the power of simplicity from the microbes behind today’s emerging diseases; microbes discovered long ago that evolution favors economy. It may be, for example, that some drugs and vaccines should be more

nuanced than today’s, taking aim at only the most virulent strains of each bug. Some culprits are bound to survive anyway, the thinking goes, and they might as well be ones we can get along with. Then the few deadly individuals that do remain—by becoming resistant to drugs or by hiding—will have to compete with the much bigger population of their less virulent peers.

“To be honest and realistic, we’re going to have most of these organisms living with us long into the future in one form or another,” Ewald says. “In those cases we're going to need evolutionary interventions that tip the balance of competition toward the benign strains. We need to control evolution.”

It’s a radical idea, controlling evolution, but one that is helping shape a new vision of the microbial future. It’s a future in which truly beatable diseases will be hit with the full force of modern medicine. And it’s a future in which some drugs and vaccines may actually pull a few punches: dodge and feint as their targets do.

Perhaps most important, it’s a future in which people will begin to see that

with just six billion MORE ON OUR WEBSITE

of us against so many more of them, we | Lear how humans and microbes coexist—and how

all have a stake in they don’t—at nationalgeo

even the most distant emerging microbial graphic.com/ngm/0202. AOL Keyword: NatGeoMag

coup. oO

31

Amid the Unrelenting Spread of AIDS

Elijah Philip Kiirya, a 14-year-

old Ugandan, does daily chores j ; near the graves of relatives Pee ee felled by AIDS, With more than. Rerrhe

36 million people now infected eo ek Meme with HIV, AIDS continues to 4 a

claim lives—and to elude

scientists trying to:stop it. ~

CHALLENGES FOR HUMANITY

By Michael Klesius warionat ceocrarnic warren Photographs by Karen Kasmauski

N A SWELTERING MORNING last February, a stray dog lay panting in the doorway of Clinic 17 of the Bangkok Vaccine Evaluation Group. Inside, the drone of an air conditioner filled an upstairs room where a handful of Thai nurses bustled around a 37- year-old heroin addict on an examination table. Injections had so scarred the veins in his arms that the nurses had turned him onto his stom- ach to draw blood from a vessel in the back of his knee. As the dark liquid trickled into the syringe the man smiled, baring gray teeth.

“This is going to be very beneficial for society,” he said.

Or so he hopes. His blood, drawn and tested twice a year, is contributing to the worldwide search for a possible preventive vaccine for HIV, the virus that causes the disease AIDS.

Some 2,500 injecting drug users in Thai- land, like the man at Clinic 17, have enrolled in a trial of the first potential HIV vaccine to reach the third and final stage of clinical test- ing. By the beginning of last year the Thai participants were part of a group of almost 8,000 people in Thailand, Europe, and North America—all at high risk for HIV but all HIV- negative at the start of three-year trials—who volunteered to receive either injections of the vaccine, called AIDSVAX, or a placebo, without knowing which they would be given.

In high-risk groups a predictable percentage of participants—from 1.5 to 6 a year, depend- ing on sexual or drug habits—would be ex- pected to become infected with HIV over the course of a trial, even with thorough counsel- ing in risk reduction. To determine if AIDS- VAX might lower the percentage, follow-up blood testing takes place at six-month intervals. If the vaccine group shows a lower infection

33

rate than the placebo group, there is evidence that the vaccine is working. But we won't know for certain until the end of the year, when we have results from the first trials, begun in 1998- 99, in Europe and North America.

What we do know is that more than 36 mil- lion people worldwide carry HIV, although 95 percent of them are never officially diagnosed HIV-positive. Every 24 hours 15,000 more become infected with the virus, while 8,000 others die of the resultant AIDS. And we know that AIDS victims suffer merciless deaths when their disabled immune systems allow other- wise treatable ailments to become fatal.

As 1 traveled from orphanages in Africa to hospices in Russia to clinics in Thailand, I saw

34

the tortured face of AIDS. It grimaced with the pain of fever and nausea. It gasped with fluid- filled lungs. It wore huge, open sores emerged from deep in the throat and spread over the lips, neck, and torso. In advanced stages of the disease, the central nervous sys- tem can begin to deteriorate, leaving some vic- tims powerless even to close their eyes and mouths. Nerve endings in the extremities go numb or tingle as if pricked by thousands of needles. AIDS robs the brain of its cognitive functions, leaving patients raving with demen- tia. It saps the body’s protein, wasting muscles to the bone. Draped in nothing but skin, 20-year-olds look 70. Even then the release of weeks or months aw

death can li

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

SEARCH FOR A CURE

To keep her custom- ers happy, a karaoke bar girl in Kampong Cham, Cambodia, puts up with inti- mate advances. Hired to sell beer, she may also later sell unprotected sex to supplement her meager salary. Such transactions have helped make the country’s AIDS epi- demic the worst in Southeast Asia, with about 4 percent of adults infected.

A heroin addict in Moscow prepares to shoot up (below); he learned to use clean needles in a Doctors Without Bor- ders risk-reduction program. Nearly 90 percent of Russia’s HIV infections occur among addicts shar- ing dirty needles.

Three million people died of AIDS in 2000. As the pandemic grows, it forces the world to see what it may not want to see: That diseases arising among specific populations—prosti- tutes (known to HIV/AIDS specialists as “sex workers”) and their customers, drug users, and gay men—can flare into greater pandemics. That women in the developing world have little leverage to negotiate safe sex with their part- ners and are often abused for trying. That pov- erty, more than any single factor, drives the spread of AIDS by forcing young people into sex work or, as in Eastern Europe, leading them to the trap of injecting drugs. And that rich nations are often insensitive to the health prob- lems of impoverished ones. Ninety-four out of every hundred HIV-infected people live in developing nations, where currently available drug therapies are largely unaffordable. While such medicines do not prevent infection, they do lower the level of virus in the body and may, according to some experts, thus reduce trans- mission rates. Many public health officials say that the drugs coupled with prevention pro- grams in developing nations could slow the pace of the pandemic.

EBATE OVER SOCIAL and economic

issues surrounding AIDS lay years

away when the U.S. Centers for Dis-

ease Control and Prevention (CDC) sounded the first alarm in June 1981. That month the agency issued a warning about an unusual cellular-immune dysfunction found in “five previously healthy individuals without a clinically apparent underlying immunodefi- ciency,” and a year later the term AIDS was coined. As the disease took on the dimensions of a plague, it swept away notions that great pandemics belong to history. It added to the understanding that an exotic family of viruses called retro- viruses, more commonly seen in an- imals, could infect humans and cause disease. And it confirmed growing data that viruses could cause cancer in humans.

Some 20 years later “we know more about HIV than we know about any microbe ever studied,” says Robert Gallo, who headed the National Institutes of Health (NIH)

35

“The two types of human immunodeficiency virus—HIV-1 and HIV-2—are primate viruses that became partly adapted to humans,” says Paul Telfer, a New York University primatolo- gist doing research in Africa. Though these mutant viruses may have emerged in the early 1900s, the first known case of the resulting disease—later named acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AlIDS—occurred in 1959. Since then changes in sexual behavior, increased drug abuse, a boom in international travel, and a breakdown of political 929

and social systems have created a pandemic. 40,900

CDC reports an unusual im- mune system JULY 1982 deficiency U.S. health among gay officials name the men in the U.S. emerging disease acquired immune deficiency syndrome,

End of 1985

APRIL 1984 Every region of An AIDS epi- Dr. Robert Gallo the world now vail demic among of the National reports at least heterosexuals Cancer Institute one AIDS case. MARCH 1987 in Central Africa at NIH announces First antiretroviral is recorded. that his team of AIDS drug- AFrench research scientists has MARCH 1985 azidothymidine, team reports isolated HIV and First HIV anti- or AZT-is appr. ved finding a retro- developed a body test is farues in thes: Looped red rib- virus that may blood test for it. approved for bon becomes: cause AIDS. use in the U.S. the international Screening of the symbol for AIDS nation's blood awareness. supply begins, AIDS becomes the leading cause * shee of death for In two decades AIDS has killed more than 20 million people pedple ithe worldwide. As infection rates have soared, so has the U.S. between the ages of 25 and 44.

annual death toll. The disease claimed three million, most in their prime, in the year 2000 alone. Children left as orphans

a Outbreak of HIV and jobs left vacant are now crippling burdens in the countries is reported

é among intrave- with the largest losses. noe dig teers in Eastern Europe.

First large-scale human trial of an AIDS vaccine begins with 5,400 North American and European volunteers.

‘SOURCE; UNAIDS NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAPS:

team that contributed to the discovery of HIV in 1984. But we still don’t understand exactly how the virus causes disease.

HIV seems full of contradictions. It can overwhelm the human immune system, yet the virus itself is fragile. Cold viruses linger on hands, and sometimes for days on doorknobs, but fresh air dries and destabilizes HIV in hours or even minutes. Contact with rubbing alcohol or chlorinated water quickly renders it inactive. Simple bar soap neutralizes HIV by breaking the chemical bonds of its lipids, or fats. And because so few cases of oral transmis- sion have been documented, doctors conclude that the same antiviral compounds in saliva and stomach acids that protect us from a host of germs prove very effective against HIV in low concentrations.

Once a person is infected with HIV, how- ever, the virus attacks the very immune cells, called T cells, meant to fight it. “Think about trying to invade a fortress,” said Gary Nabel, director of NIH’s Vaccine Research Center. “Would you start by setting off a grenade in front? No. You would sneak in quietly, pen- etrate the nucleus, and sit there. You'd clone yourself. You'd make lots of copies. Then, when an opportune occasion came along, when there was a lot of commotion and people were dis- tracted, you'd say, ‘Boom! Here I go’

“That’s what HIV does. That’s what has allowed it to become so successful from its per- spective and so tragic from ours,” said Nabel. During a period of typically eight to ten years HIV lurks in the body, mutating rapidly and thus avoiding recognition. It reproduces mas- sively, and waits. Finally, at the introduction of a disease that an unimpaired immune sys- tem would normally control—tuberculosis or pneumonia, for example—the immune system is overcome by HIV so that it cannot fight, and the disease kills.

“ INETEEN NINETY-SIX was the year the thunder came,” Igor Ivanov said, and “the Russians heard it, and they crossed themselves.”

Ivanov, a doctor at the Kaliningrad Regional Infectional Hospital, was referring to the year HIV cut loose in Russia amid the chaos of a collapsing economy. Unemployment shot up, and with it alcoholism and crime. Drug dealers began to create a heroin market in Russia.

37

Through shared needles, HIV reached far beyond its African origins into a country that during Soviet times had tightly controlled what crossed its borders.

“I got HIV by using a friend’s syringe,” said Dennis, 22, a patient at the Anti-AIDS Center in the Kaliningrad hospital. “I was 14 when I started shooting. I had no idea of the risks. It was cool. It was in fashion.” Dennis stood tall with broad shoulders and red hair. He wasn’t sick yet but claimed he had been suffering chest pains. “Now my friends are gone,” he con- tinued. “They don’t want to shake my hand. My only friends now are HIV-positives.”

“We knew we were on the edge in 1995,” said Tatiana Nikitina, chief doctor at the Anti-AIDS Center. The region already suffered Russia’s highest rates of syphilis and hepatitis. Prostitu- tion, common to many port cities, complicated the picture. “AIDS started to spread not only among men but among women too, as drugs and prostitution are linked,” said Nikitina. “It’s all connected to the period when the free mar- ket made many things available for the first time, including drugs.”

If 1996 brought AIDS to Russia, the same year saw the advent in the West of protease inhibitors, drugs that suppress the ability of HIV to replicate.

But protease inhibitors, often combined with other HIV drugs such as AZT, are far from prevention or cure. Their effects lift the death sentence of an HIV infection only for a time. Furthermore, they cost as much as $15,000 a year, with huge drug-company profit margins, making them affordable in the U.S. and Europe but generally out of reach in developing nations.

In 1998 the Brazilian government began to pro- duce and distribute copies of brand-name AIDS drugs using loopholes in inter- national trade patents held by American and Euro- pean pharmaceutical com- panies. Brazil’s model has cut the death rate from AIDS in that country by half and stabilized the growth rate for new infec- tions. Recent World Trade Organization negotiations

38

LEARNING THE FACTS OF LIFE Leaving nothing to the imagination, a demonstration by AIDS-awareness vol- unteers of how to use a condom pro- vokes a frank discus- sion about safe sex at a bar in Francis- town, Botswana. With almost 20 per- cent of its population infected with HIV and with at least one baby born with HIV each hour, Botswana has begun an aggres- sive prevention campaign.

Feeding her baby formula provided by the Botswana gov- ernment helps keep an infected mother (below) from passing on the virus through her breast milk.

Free drug therapy reduced the risk of

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

transmission while she was pregnant. Also ravaged by the disease, Thailand has taken drastic steps to slow its spread. Soldiers learn about AIDS by grim example as they view a victim's body at a hospice run by a Buddhist monastery.

SEARCH FOR A CURE

40 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

“It's a full-time job, being an AIDS patient,” says W. Max- well Lawton (below), a Wash- ington, D.C., artist who gives himself a testosterone injec- tion once a week to help maintain muscle mass. Every day he follows a strict sched- ule, taking more than 20 pills between periods of fasting. Ten years ago he was so sick doctors gave him only three months to live. After partici- pating in successful drug

SEARCH FOR A CURE

Hope, Resolve, Progress

trials, he hopes he will live to see a cure. “There's always hope,” he says. “The human spirit will find it somewhere.” In Franceville, Gabon, Paul Telfer of New York University takes hair and blood samples from a pet chimpanzee (left). “A thorough understanding of the HIV viral evolution from its nonhuman primate origin to its current pan- demic will help us create more sensitive tests and also

contribute to vaccine devel- opment,” he explains.

The first large-scale vaccine trial in a developing country began in Thailand in 1999 among drug addicts like this volunteer receiving one of seven injections (left, middle).

Last May the 16th annual AIDS Walk in New York City attracted 40,000 participants and raised 4.5 million dollars to fund social services for people living with HIV/AIDS.

41

pointed toward increased low- of AIDS drugs in other developing nations. While drug therapy results are promising, the

st availability

use of protease inhibitors and other antivirals, such as AZT, can produce grave side effects that include nausea, bone loss, diabetes, liver dam- age, raised cholesterol levels, and depre: And doctors do not yet understand why HIV drugs rearrange fat in the body. The face be- comes sunken and the limbs wizened while fat piles up elsewhere. To see the bulging belly and the humped back of a patient who has taken antivirals for several years only underscores the need to find another way to inhibit HIV. “Historically vaccines are the only way to stop an epidemic,” said Dr. Peggy Johnston,

assistant director for AIDS vaccines at NIH. “But while a vaccine used as a public health tool might slow an epidemic or prevent one from starting, so far vaccines have not helped sick people.”

Lusaka, Zambia, is a city where the worst- case AIDS scenario is coming true—HIV has infected one in three adults. There I met Evans Ganzini Banda, a clean-cut Zambian in his late 20s. Not long ago Banda became one of 650,000 people to have lost both parents to AIDS in this country where, like many countries in s Saharan Africa, widespread prostitution and multiple sexual partners are common.

Faced with the expense of supporting five sisters, Banda founded a newspaper called

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

THE NEXT GENERATION

A crowd of children in Uganda are the offspring of two brothers and their several wives. One brother has AIDS. He has probably infect- ed his wives, who may have passed the illness on during pregnancy to some of their children. No one knows for sure because HIV tests are not available in this village.

This one man’s children may become AIDS orphans. Yet as they and their cous- ins grow up, they will almost surely benefit from the na- tional sex-education campaign that has nearly halved the prevalence of HIV among adults in Uganda—one suc- cessful strike against a cruel foe.

Trend Setters, which prints frank articles about the risks of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. As further illustration of Lusaka’s plight, he ushered me into a taxi one Saturday night for a very uncomfortable exercise.

“The nightclubs are where AIDS is happen- ing,” he said as we toured the city.

We pulled up in front of one such club, a cinder-block structure with a corrugated steel roof. A group of teenage girls clustered at the car window. One of them, a gangly adolescent in beat-up high heels and a miniskirt, intro- duced herself as Adrina and slid into the car.

“How much?” asked Banda.

“It depends on what you want.”

He told her.

SEARCH FOR A CURE

“Thirty thousand kwacha [about ten U.S. dollars],” she said. “With condom.”

“How much without?” asked Banda.

She shook her head.

“Why not?” he asked.

“AIDS,” she said.

Banda pressed: “OK, 60,000 kwacha, with- out condom.”

She hesitated, then answered: “A hundred thousand, without.”

Banda looked at me. We had found the value of a life here—about $33.

We told Adrina we were actually taking a survey and asked her why she would risk her life. She said she had no other way to make money for the coming week. She was trying to save $125 to start a business sell- ing secondhand clothes imported from the U.K. In the meantime she had one commod- ity to sell.

We gave her some money, about twice what she could have expected from a typical cus- tomer. Banda implored her to go home. She climbed out of the car counting the cash, leav- ing us pessimistic about her chances.

N A RAINY WINTER DAY on the NIH campus back in the U.S., the Vac- cine Research Center’s Gary Nabel summed it up thus: “The problems of the developing world are our problems too. We're already dealing with more than 36 mil- lion incubators walking around with this virus, spreading it to other people. And it’s got enor- mous abilities for adapting to new niches.” Clearly, what causes AIDS and what causes an AIDS pandemic are two very different, intractable problems. But the words I'd heard about vaccines from Peggy Johnston at NIH rang true. A future vaccine will not cure Dennis, already infected with HIV, and offers little hope for Adrina or the Thai man at Clinic 17, in danger of becoming infected soon. But a vaccine might someday make a difference for people like them, for their countries, for the world. Until that day arrives, the AIDS crisis will

continue to rampage through developing nations with unpre- dictable consequences for the future of all humankind. o

MORE ON OUR WEBSITE

Learn more about progress in the worldwide fight against HIV/AIDS at nationalgeo graphic.com/ngm/0202. AOL Keyword; NatGeoMag

43

os TTR ROI FFA al

A Last Caribbean Refuge ..

REESS “,

Wall of motion, schooling bluestriped grunts and stray mahogany and schoolmaster snappers glide as one

44

HAEMULON SCIURUS (S UTJANUS MAHOC /LVERY SHEEN); LUTJANUS APODUS (YELLOW TAIL)

through Caribbean waters off southern Cuba—a nearly unspoiled oasis of living, flowing color.

OGCOCEPHALUS

Submarine sensors: A lure hidden in a batfish’s proboscis (left) attracts tiny swimmers and senses their

BY PETER BENCHLEY

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID DOUBILET

T WAS ALMOST LIKE A HALLUCINATION. IMMEDIATE. A SENSE OF DISLOCATION. SOMETHING WAS AWRY.

A few seconds earlier, seen from the surface, everything had looked normal. The midday sun shot arrows of light through the dappled water, illuminating a routine reef in an isolated back- water of an exhausted sea. But no sooner had | submerged—my bubbles had had no time to disperse nor the mist to clear from my mask— than I knew I was in the grip of the weird.

Time was out of joint.

I had flopped overboard from a dinghy on a glassy Caribbean sea in the summer of the year 2000 and in an instant, apparently, slipped backward nearly half a century into an under- water realm that had not existed, so far as I knew, since the 1950s.

Residents swarmed over me, welcoming me to the neighborhood, animals in numbers and diversity | hadn’t seen in decades, not since Lyndon Johnson was President and man had yet to set foot on the moon. Groupers of all descriptions and sizes lumbered around me: Nassau groupers, black groupers, even the patriarch of the grouper clan, the gigantic jewfish (aka the goliath grouper), creatures widely assumed to have almost disappeared from the Caribbean long ago—speared, hooked, netted, poisoned by men driven by poverty, hunger, and need.

Schools of yellowtail snappers and blue creole wrasses darted about in a frenzy, then quickly departed, their curiosity sated.

A squadron of glittering silver tarpon passed regally by, implacable eyes showing neither interest nor alarm.

Green moray eels slid partway out of their crevice homes, needle-toothed jaws mimicking menace as, rhythmically, they pumped oxygen- bearing water over their throbbing gills.

In the middle distance reef sharks scanned the coral for signs of wound or weakness,

50

having appraised and dismissed me as worthy of neither fearing nor eating.

Nearer came a big, robust bull shark— pregnant, swimming close enough to let me feel the pressure wave of her passing, as if shouldering me aside.

I settled to the bottom and spun in a slow circle, my eyes searching every corner of this peaceable kingdom. Pairs of jacks tumbled along the reef line, squabbling, it seemed, or playing, but in fact breeding, as evidenced by tiny puffs of white that emerged from the com- motion: eggs conjoined with sperm.

Fifty or sixty feet above, a pair of turtles swam locked together, one atop the other, snouts out of water . . . mating.

For an hour or more | luxuriated in this astonishing replay of halcyon days and cher- ished memories. Then, low on air, I surfaced. Photographer David Doubilet, who has either (as I suspect) grown gills from spending 45 years underwater or (as he claims) learned to draw breath only once every few weeks, stayed below capturing images to prove that these wonderful creatures, relics of happier, healthier times in the sea, still did, indeed, exist.

That they do exist—or, more accurately, that they could continue to survive and reproduce amid the shameful devastation of most of the surrounding sea—was thanks to an unlikely combination of factors: autocracy, bureau- cracy, paucity, wisdom, ingenuity, dogged persistence in the face of a lonely ideology, and, finally, common sense... all of which are characteristic of the constantly changing enigma that is Cuba.

I was well aware that these particular par- adisiacal waters were neither common nor typical. Cuba has more than 3,000 miles of coastline, four primary reef systems (each of

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

Ascending coral cliffs in a spotlight, free-diving champion Deborah Andollo of Cuba practices her skills in Devil’s Hole. One breath takes her to 133 feet with ease (her world record is 243 feet) before she soars upward for air. “The cliff walls watch me go by,” she says, “murmuring secrets of how to do it better.”

of straits

La Habana

(Havana) Yucatan *

Channel

CARB A

I | Punta Francés | Cayo Largo Isla de la Juyentud nce fh uth) wr @ ( peeing

Devil's Hole

CAYMAN ISLANDS WK

ARIBBEAN SEA

which is about equal to or longer than the Flor- ida Keys), and more than 4,000 islands, islets, cays, humps, lumps, and spits. From conver- sations with Cuban scientists and environmen- talists who have been working for more than ten years to develop a comprehensive, sustainable marine conservation program, I knew that many of the reefs were severely stressed.

“We're beginning to see serious damage from coastal development and overfishing,” one scientist told me. “But look: We're a population of 11 million people, and we have to struggle for everything we get. There’s only so much we can protect.”

Among the areas that are being protected is a patch off Cuba’s southeast coast of roughly a thousand square miles of reefs, mangrove swamps, and islands unnamed and named— Cayo Caballones, Cayo Cachiboca, Laguna de Boca de Guano, and so on—that is known col- lectively as Jardines de la Reina, or the Gardens of the Queen. It is a sedulously guarded marine sanctuary, off-limits to all but a few Cuban lob- ster boats and a handful of foreign divers and light-tackle fishermen.

Too far from land (50 miles) to be accessible to most local commercial fishers and protected by strictly enforced government laws against poaching, the Gardens of the Queen had been allowed to flourish almost entirely free from human assault.

Sti), distance and regulations alone could not be relied upon to deter the desperate, and

52

BAHAMAS

CUBAN ISLES

With the largest submerged shelf of all Caribbean islands, Cuba— including its four archipelagoes and myriad bays, cays, mangrove forests, and reefs—sustains astonishing marine biodiversity. Despite some shoreline devel- opment, such as hotels on Cayo Largo (center island in satellite view at right), many reefs remain nearly unscathed—far from land, pollu- tion, and progress.

the gardens were further sheltered by a public- private joint venture between the Cuban government and an Italian company named Avalon. The company had a license to operate a substantial catch-and-release fishing camp called La Tortuga from a floating hotel moored in the labyrinthine canals among the mangrove swamps. It shared its profits with the Cuban Ministry of Tourism, and its 20 small fishing boats were always on the water, carrying one or two of the hotel’s 25 weekly guests to or from a fishing spot. They were a constantly vig- ilant presence.

“We bring our guests every day to every cor- ner of the gardens,” Giuseppe (Pepe) Omegna, resident manager of La Tortuga, told me. “We have the finest fly-fishing in the world for bonefish, tarpon, and permit, so obviously it is in our interest that nobody affects the area. We cooperate fully with the border police and the fishing authorities to take care of this paradise. We never leave the gardens.”

If the Gardens of the Queen could be pre- served in their natural state while at the same time be opened to carefully monitored groups of visitors, the thought occurred to me, they could become a template for sound develop- ment and a significant contributor to the chaotic Cuban economy.

When I returned to our boat, the 110-foot Ocean Diver, | was greeted by Manuel Mola, a tough, compact dive master who had been assigned to us by the Cuban government

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

LANOSAT IMAGE PROCESSING BY SERGE ANDREFOUET, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA, ST. PETERSBURG, AND PHILIP KRAMER, UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

(nominally the Ministry of Tourism) as guide, adviser, and . . . well, let’s be frank . . . minder.

“You see now why we always argue with the Ministry of Fisheries,” he said with a grin. “They tell us how much fish are worth to the fishermen and their families. We tell them how much more the fish can bring in if they’re left alive.”

The conflict implicit in Manuel’s remark— the value of fish as commercial product versus the value of all marine creatures as tourist attractions—reflected a change ongoing throughout Cuba. At a time when tourism is seen as the salvation of the Cuban economy, scientists within and without the govern- ment are struggling to balance the demands of growth with the need for preservation.

The island nation already receives more than two million visitors a year, and the government has ambitions to welcome more than five mil- lion foreigners annually by 2005. Gigantic hotels are bursting forth like mushrooms upon the shorelines. Aided by mammoth infusions of European cash, Old Havana is being lov- ingly, expertly, and splendidly restored, its colonial-era buildings supplied with all the modern amenities—from air-conditioning to Internet access—necessary to attract 21st- century businesses and visitors.

CUBA REE

HE CUBAN GOVERNMENT knows full well

that in the tough competition for the

global tourist dollar, environmental sensitivity is a valuable commodity.

I met one day with Rosa Elena Simeén, Cuba’s minister of science, environment, and technology, in her cavernous office in the clas- sic capitol building in Old Havana. A grand- motherly woman with eyes of burnished steel, Minister Sime6n admitted that toughness was part of her mandate.

“Laws are only as good as their enforcement,” she said. “We must be strict. We'll shut down any hotel, any factory, any investment oppor- tunity that violates our environmental laws.” She smiled knowingly and added, “Of course, we can be stricter. The control we have permits the maintenance of order.” So, I noticed, did the size of her staff. Her young ministry, begun only in 1994, was now composed of 40 entities employing 9,000 people, including, she said proudly, “more than 350 Ph.D.’s.”

Outside Old Havana, in a quiet residential neighborhood, Maria Elena Ibarra Martin, director of the Center of Marine Studies at the University of Havana, was, if anything, more direct than Minister Simeén in articulating her government’s commitment to marine conservation.

53

* af Z é . m _ ’ : ; . 2 ‘ : ¢ fr v \ ‘e a £ ASE aa A ' a 2 AY " eo Se he a ‘ . eer ete 4 ¢ i> ‘ j rz: : ‘ ‘ é = « % get “ ae di j : e c 4 ‘ \ ‘ / a » 7 ee eEE - ba \<or2 ae ty on 4 : ‘ = .

Lit from within by the photographer’s flash, a vase sponge hides a slender fish with roving eyes. About an

54

DEMOSPONGIAE (SPONGE)

inch long, the fish perches unmoving, then darts from its rosy host to feed and returns quickly to safety.

Ancient metazoans clinging to undersea walls, sponges provide feeding grounds and cover for a juvenile filefish (left) and arrow crab (below) in the Gardens of the Queen (right). “Cousteau compared sponge gardens to Ali Baba’s cave,” says photographer David Doubilet, “secret caverns filled with jewels of the Earth.”

STENORHYNCHUS SETICORNIS (CRAB)

“Because the government controls all levels of activity,” she said, “implementation of order is easier than in other Caribbean countries. There is not much violation of our laws. As a result our marine environment is in better condition than elsewhere.”

Cuba has another curious advantage over the rest of the Caribbean’s island nations: Because of its political isolation, it lags more than 40 years behind in terms of massive tour- ism development and the concomitant destruc- tion of marine life and habitat.

“Cuba can still be saved,” I was assured by Ken Lindeman, a senior scientist with Environ- mental Defense who has worked in Cuba for seven years. “But there’s not much time. There will have to be other sanctuaries as well pro- tected as the Gardens of the Queen.”

Indeed, the Chronicle of Cuban Marine Fisheries, published by the Food and Agricul- ture Organization of the United Nations, doc- uments drastic decreases in the landings of

56

certain species since the beginning of the 1990s. The chronicle concludes that “87.6 percent of fisheries resources are in a critical stage,” with declines of 95 percent and 88 percent respec- tively in landings of Nassau groupers and mul- let. Furthermore, development both on the shorelines and far inshore (dams, logging) is reducing nursery habitats for a great many marine creatures.

I had heard no tales of damage done by increased tourism, but I looked forward to seeing for myself.

I had joined Ocean Diver at Cayo Largo off Cuba’s southwest shore, just to the east of the Isle of Youth, and my first dive was at a site known as Devil’s Hole. Diving tourism is by no means a novelty in Cuba. Some popular, acces- sible sites, like Punta Francés off the Isle of Youth, attract as many as 30,000 divers a year. Devil’s Hole had been brazenly promoted in tourist brochures, and I wondered if it would live up to the puffery.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

>

¥

4)

en,

lhe attraction eluded me, however, because as far as I could see, there was no there there. The charms of Devil’s Hole were reserved for macro- photographers, whose trained eyes and special lenses could capture the minuscule life forms on the coral walls and within the countless sponges.

S WE MOTORED EAST toward the Gardens of the Queen, we encountered no other dive boats and only one or two small fishing boats. “Very few licenses, very little fuel,” one of the crew told me quietly, trusting me to extrapolate: The Cuban government was carefully restricting and monitoring all seago- ing traffic, wary of the ambitious captain who might be tempted to take his boat and all its gear, plus his family and friends and even, per- haps, a few paying passengers, on the journe across the Straits of Florida to the promise of asylum in the United States. We did mariners, though, who had managed to carve out livings for

meet some

CUBA REEFS

themselves within the maze of restrictions.

One morning our boat was approached by a large, ramshackle motor vessel that looked as if it had been at sea since Noah was a boy. The water was flat calm, so the two boats rested eas: ily side by side a few feet from one another while representatives of the two crews carried on serious, sotto voce (but utterly cordial) ne gotiations. The result: Our boat acquired more than a dozen fresh lobsters in return for a bot- ue of rum, half a pound of coffee, four rolls of toilet paper, a few packets of powdered soft drink, and (our captain added proudly, as if these were the items that had sealed the deal) “two used spark plugs.”

“All Cubans are ingenious,” he said as he

watched the lobster boat pull away. “They have

to be. Ashore these men will get so little for their lobsters that they can’t support them- selves, even though by the time the lobsters land on the tourists’ tables, they'll fetch maybe $500. So these guys stay at sea; they eat what

they catch and barter for what they need. Above all, Cubans are survivors.”

Time and again members of our cre him right. Several had advanced degre Irumis, our cook, was a veterinarian; Annie, the maid, had a master’s in education. Ashore, in their professions, they might make the peso equivalent of between $10 and $15 a month. Their salaries on the boat were roughly the same, but here there was always the chance of tips in precious U.S. dollars.

And there were occasions for freelancing. Every morning and evening from our anchor-

) proved

ages on the mudflats we could see dozens, scores, maybe even hundreds of large brown rodents foraging on the beaches of the tiny

islands or scampering through the mangroves. “Jutias,” explained one of the young crew- men. “They're a kind of tree rat.” He paused, then added with a smile: “The government keeps them here in case of war.” “As what?” I asked. “ “Food,” he replied tolerantly, “Cuba is always

Biological weapons?”

prepared for war. The trouble is, jutias have no natural enemies around here except crocodiles, and they’re eating themselves out of habitat.”

The crewman was always willing to restore nature’s balance and coincidentally, of course, to acquire a stock of scarce animal protein. Frequently he would go ashore in the twilight of morning or evening, dressed only in a bathing suit and scuba booties and carrying

CROCODYLUS ACUTUS

Undulating through a sunlit sea, an American crocodile heads toward the nutrient-rich feeding grounds of mangrove forests that line Cuba’s southwest coast. Formed by tidal ebb and flow and walled with tangled roots, shallow mangrove channels (below left) wind like rivers through the

trees, their floors carpeted with fallen leaves. Endless hideouts in the calm, mur

'y waters—tinted

tealike by dissolved organic matter—safeguard nurseries of juvenile reef fish.

a machete. Nimble as a spider, he would vanish into a tangle of mangrove roots and branches and emerge, usually in under an hour, with three or four jutia carcasses swinging by their tails. Most he would skin, butcher, and freeze to give to his family; some he would share (unnecessarily generously, | thought) with us.

To my pampered palate, jutias were barely edible—slimy of texture and vile of flavor. But I, of course, had no firsthand knowledge of hunger or malnutrition. If I had, jutias might be as savory to me as veal.

The mangrove swamps that shelter jutias are vital organs in these marine ecosystems. They shelter, feed, and protect animals newborn, young, and vulnerable, and they filter the water that comes and goes on the tides. Though in the mangroves of the Gardens of the Queen we saw the inevitable signs of human intrusion— beer and soda cans, whiskey bottles, plastic spoons—mostly we saw healthy signs of bur- geoning life: baby barracuda already swimming in the protection of schools; tiny, cylindrical tunicates dangling from underwater roots; infinitesimal shrimps and crabs. And some- where in the rich and cloudy water, we knew,

CUBA REEFS

were the fingerlings of the larger animals of the reefs: the jacks, the snappers, and the sharks.

NORKELING through the mangroves early

one morning, | watched a young sting-

ray bury itself in the bottom, fluttering its wings in the silt until nothing was visible but the cartilaginous lumps over its eyes. Suddenly a rush of pain stopped my breath; my cheeks and neck felt assaulted by a million flaming needles. Quickly I retreated, scanning the murk for villains while trying foolishly and in vain to douse the feeling of fire by rubbing my face.

It took me a few moments to realize that the answer to the pain lay not in what I could see but in what I couldn’t: microscopic poisonous harpoons, the stinging nematocysts of hidden Cassiopea jellyfish, released from their repose in the muck by the turmoil caused by the sting- ray’s wings.

All perfectly normal, all quite painful.

One phenomenon we encountered with increasing frequency, however, was not only not familiar to me but quickly became troubling. And then, as corroborative reports reached us from more and more (Continued on page 66)

59

WILD PROFILES

It takes all types to cast the drama beneath the sea, here captured against a curtain of liquid

blue. A gray angelfish (top left) is the epitome of underwater grace: a leisurely swimmer slipping silently between corals, nibbling at the sponges and polyps growing there. As though created by Dr. Seuss, the ever frowning shortnose batfish

(left) is a cumbersome paddler better suited for

lunging ahead froglike on the seafloor, where it jabs its snout into the sand and gobbles up mol lusks and other edibles. A swifter mover, the reef squid (above) flies through water by jet pro- pulsion, usually backward, and can change its hue to match its surroundings, which it surveys through a remarkably advanced pair of eyes.

ANGELFISH); SEPIOTEUTHIS SEPIOIDEA (SQUID).

61

Like tiny finger puppets, blennies keep heads up and tails tucked into crevices or sponges. The secretary blenny (above) stays half out of danger until ready to rush at prey, while the arrow blenny (left) is often away from its shelter stalk- ing fish and shrimps. A bandtooth conger’s big eyes (below) greeted Doubilet as he peered into a sandy hole that was perfectly round—an uncommon sight in nature. “These eels are master excavators,” he says. Aptly named, a male yel- lowhead jawfish (right) uses his mouth to engineer his bur- row—a walled underground chamber—and to protect his young. The jawful of caviar is not food but progeny, which he churns in his mouth to aid development.

ACANTHEMBLEMARIA MARIA (SECRETARY BLENNY); LUCAYABLENNIUS ZINGARO (ARROW BLENNY): ARIOSOMA BALEARICUM (CONGER); OPISTOGNATHUS AURIFRONS (JAWFISH)

Silvery ghosts at twilight, silky sharks and yellowtail snappers feed on offerings from a dive boat. “It was

64

S(SNAPPERS)

wild,” recalls Doubilet. “They would swim in circles, bump one another, turn, and fly the other way.”

CLEAR SURVIVORS

A light suspended from a boat off the Isle of Youth draws radiant visitors. These box jellyfish (right), unlike deadlier varieties, rarely kill humans though their sting is agonizing. More benign evening guests include a tiny post-larval surgeonfish (above), whose transparency turns it invisible to predators. The stunning biodiversity of a bygone era still thrives in Cuban waters. Says Doubilet, “It’s like a memory preserved.”

(Continued from page 59) _ places, it took an ominous turn. It goes by different names in different locales: In the Cayman Islands it is “sea itch,” in Bermuda “sand fleas,” in Florida “sea lice.” Here in Cuba it is named after the Carib Indians, the fiercest of all the aboriginal residents. Cubans call it simply “Caribe.”

I have no name for it, only a description: invisible, time-delayed, ambushing agony. It struck in shallow water or deep, on the bottom or at the surface, on the reef or in open water. It infiltrated any opening in mask or wet suit and, once within, would flood a human body with tiny, biting, burrowing, infesting, and infecting monsters.

First we all wore hoods and booties and gloves. Then, as they proved ineffectual, we swabbed petroleum jelly on all junctures of rubber and flesh. Finally we wrapped our ankles and wrists with waterproof tape.

And still they got us. I recall surfacing one day and turning back to take one of David's cameras from him, and as his head broke

66

water, I saw that every millimeter of exposed skin was swollen with pustular sores.

Was the villain a flea, a bug, a jellyfish, a lar- val state of something? I asked the captain and crew; I sought enlightenment from the boat’s radio. I found no answer. It was Caribe. Period. It came every year with the warming of the water, and every year the water seemed to be warming earlier. Usually it did not strike until August or September, but this year . . . yes, the water on the surface was already nearly 90°F, and it was still only early June. But, we were told, that was how it was with Caribe. Perhaps prayer would help. (It didn’t.)

Some of us seemed to be more susceptible to Caribe than others. A few of the Cubans in our crew were immune, which suggested that whatever toxin was being delivered by what- ever animal was an allergen.

We didn’t care; all we wanted was a cure. We tried urine, we tried meat tenderizer, we tried (on some obscure authority) Head & Shoulders shampoo. Usually, nothing helped;

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

sometimes, something seemed to, temporarily.

And then, inexplicably, Caribe began to abate. First there were dives when no one encountered it, then entire days.

I never discovered for certain exactly what Caribe was, a larva or a louse, and I expect I never will. But I’m sure that it will return next year and the next, for the fact that it has a name suggests that it’s part of the natural rhythm of the sea.

S 1 LEFT CUBA, new diving resorts were being developed rapidly, and existing facilities, like the one at Cayo Coco on the island’s northeast coast, were being upgraded to receive jumbo jets carrying hun- dreds of foreign tourists. There was no way to know how thoroughly those waters and those reefs were being protected; for the time being, the Gardens of the Queen remained the best protected marine sanctuary in all of Cuba. With the advent of a new administration in Washington, relations between the United

CUBA REEFS

ACANTHURUS SP. (SURGEONFISH); CUBOMEDUSAE (JELLYFISH)

States and Cuba had slipped into one of their cyclical freezes, and the amount of assistance American scientists and field experts would henceforth be permitted to offer to Cuba’s ocean conservation program had become an open question ...one we hoped would be answered positively.

As Environmental Defense’s Ken Lindeman explained, helping Cuba protect its waters would be a win-win situation for all con- cerned. “Cuba is so close to Florida,” he said, “and the ocean currents run north through the Yucatan Channel, so anything we can do to replenish Cuban fisheries will help replenish U.S. and other neighboring fisheries too.”

All of us who have been privileged to dive in the Gardens of the Queen hope fer- vently that common sense for the com- monweal will prevail over short-term polit- ical expediency. J

MORE ON OUR WEBSITE

Photographer David Doubilet narrates an underwater tour of Cuba's reefs at national geographic.com/ngm/0202. AOL Keyword: NatGeoMag

By Marco Pinna

== ~—_____NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ITALIAN EDITION

Photographs by Carsten Peter

For 24 days last summer Mount Etna gave its most foF-¥--4ilal-@ aloha mlal F-We[-tet-Yo(- Wm @ilel-t-1 hg watched by scien- tists, rivers of lava Valo colblalt-llal meh

—— fire renewed the awe of those who live in the shadow of Sicily’s famed No} ot-lalom

69

‘

have to.stant still, ee Ein where the lava: ec mombs are falling; and ae “eet Out of he way.” ae es?

,, ; —Photographer CagstePeter

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urrounded by fire, we are cold. Altitude and sulfurous vapors make it hard to breathe. Yet standing 9,500 feet up the side of Mount Etna, we are willing captives of an apocalyptic landscape. A thousand feet below us, at the center of a valley of black lava called the Piano del Lago, an enormous cone that didn’t exist a week ago erupts incessantly, hurling lava bombs as big as cars hundreds of feet into the air. We hear the roar of the explosions and the thud of the incandescent rocks as they hit the ground and roll down the sides of the cone. Beside it, lava spews from another cone, smaller but just as active. The golden river of lava to our left is pouring from a fissure in a summit crater belching smoke and ash above us. I move closer to the lava until the heat

is unbearable. It makes strident clicking sounds, like glass rubbing glass. But if you listen more closely, you hear a dark murmuring below.

“It’s incredible,” photographer Carsten Peter says to me. “This cone has grown 300 feet in a few days.” Carsten has been on Etna since seismic tremors her- alded the July 17 eruption. Lava was already flowing from the summit when his colleague Chris Heinlein straddled a new fissure on the flank (above). Four days later the fissure blew nearly a mile high (right).

72

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Etna’s realm Europe’s highest active volcano—nearly 11,000 feet tall—Etna dominates northeastern Sicily

and has loomed in cultures that colonized the Mediterranean’s largest island.

Plato sailed from Greece in 387 B.c. just to have a look at it. Legend says that

here Odysseus dodged boulders flung by a Cyclops. Romans considered it Vul- can’s forge. Ninth-century Arabs transformed its snow into sweet, flavored ices.

Always smoking, Etna has been increasingly active in the past 50 years. Because its outbursts occur at upper elevations and its lava moves slowly, Etna rarely takes human lives. The intensity of this eruption produced a plume of ash that arced toward Libya (above, July 24), eventually reaching into the Sahara. A Landsat image on July 21 (left, with low clouds) captures the plume and new lava fissures.

ETNA IGNITES

With strong winds blowing heat and gases away from lallei Mm lalehie)-4e-\olal_ig Carsten Peter worked—jn res- , -Biyator aridhe|met' —a mere 20 feet from this turbulent

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Volcanic Intrigue

“| have never seen so many bd allal-<-Mar-le)ol-allal-@- tan cal) same time on this volcano,” said Carsten Peter, a vet- eran Etna watcher. For sci- entists too last summer's eruption was a chance to study surprising Etna behav- ior. In late June the south- BOTH BY TOM PFEIFFER

east summit crater displayed routine degassing (above); a slender tornado forms in the convergence of the heat and the altitude's chill. Then paroxysmal blasts rocked the crater, and a fissure cracked its side, spilling lava. Lava began pouring from five other new fissures farther down the flank. Two cones rose on the flank with breathtaking speed, one spouting lava fountains as tall as 1,300 feet (left). Simultaneous summit and flank action is unusual for Etna, and the eruptions were iUlalerier-lihya->-de)lol-ih.- met tom lal-lh'2-1(-Meot mi dal-Mil-lal @t-\7- Meh a-T-l(-te- Maal lal-te-| mer- 11 [-Te] amphibole, present in Etna’s ancient lava flows but not seen in large amounts in the past 15,000 years. Is a new source of lava feeding the flank? One thing is clear to researchers: Something down there is changing.

Historic lava flows

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Scale varies in this perspective. Distance from Catania to Randazzo is 25 miles.

IMAGE BY BORIS BEHNCKE AND GIORGIO DE GUIDI, UNIVERSITY OF CATANIA, DEPARTMENT OF GEOLOGICAL SCIENCES NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAPS

Etna's most destructive eruption in history raged for four months in 1669, when relentless lava hit some dozen villages, breached the city walls of Catania, and pushed into the sea. For small towns on the lower slopes, soil enriched by volcanic ash is a trade-off for life in precarious terrain.

ETNA IGNITES rE)

A windstorm of ash and lethal gas swirls froma fissure on Piano del Lago. Over the next six days a 300-foot cone would rise here, later collapsing 65 feet.

i

“Etna can be considered a monster. But deep down, it’s a good monster.”

—Miount Etna ranger Gaetano Mangano

»

Full’ helmet and >> thermal suit— and years of ._ “learned caution. 2:2" —let French tech-

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| a L] Livin with Etn Cooling to black, a wall of jagged lava a thousand feet wide and as much as 130 feet tall dwarfs a bulldozer building a diversion embankment. The dusty, dangerous work (left) by a crew of 400 men succeeded in keeping lava away from

Rifugio Sapienza, a ski-lift base and scientific monitoring station. Lava stopped less than three miles from Nicolosi, the most threatened of the mountain's small towns. Though some roads and property were destroyed and ashfall closed the airport several days in Catania, Sicily’s second largest city, Etna kept its reputation as a “friendly giant.” But could anomalies in the 2OOI eruption signal a change in its nature?

ETNA IGNITES

MORE ON OUR WEBSITE

Hot times on Etna: Find field notes, Web-only images, links

and resources at national geographic.com/ngm/0202. AOL Keyword: NatGeoMag

85

The lights of Catania and the lonian Sea coast spread below the new Piano del Lago cone. The ancient name

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sib » Askier’s plunge toward April s bodies x elation—and calculated | risk. n Salt Lake Valley know a lot about both. With faith BA, m9 “worthy of the Mormon pioneers, many here believe that a successful Olympics will

enlighten the world to Utah's charms. Yet

_ the valley is already under strain as growing bas 9 mbers squeeze between its vast salt lake

and soaring peaks. 8 * aw 1 y,

Abruptly dissected by a railroad causeway, Great Salt Lake has two faces—the saltier side tinted pink by bacteria and algae, the fresher side enticingly blue. Devoid of fish, corrosive to boats, acrid, and hard to reach, the lake is widely scorned. It can also be enchanting—a desert sea vital to the identity of the region now encroaching on its shores.

‘ ee

n the raw clarity of a winter morning the Wasatch

mountains seemed to shoot straight up from the

flat pan of Utah’s Salt Lake Valley. Across lowland

expanses of cracked mud and brittle greasewood a family of ranchers and their help herded about 350 head of cattle into a knot. Skittish heifers bolted past lean young men in chaps, the air ringing with whoops and the hoofbeats of horses. The Old West lived.

But it was an illusion.

Overhead, planes screamed past on takeoff from Salt Lake City International Airport, which sprawled spitting distance away. The smell of jet fuel obliterated the tang of dung, dust, and potent brine from nearby Great Salt Lake. The Gillmors, whose family has ranched in this valley for more than a hundred years, once owned this patch of ground. Today they lease it from the airport, which took the land (after paying compensation) for an expansion. There have been other such takings through the years. And though the Gillmors still own enviable swaths of acreage in the valley and up in the mountains, rampant growth is putting pressure on that land, and on a way of life. Half brother Rob Erickson summed up the family’s concern: “We're kind of getting shrunk in.”

From the seat of a saddle it was easy to see what sets Salt Lake apart from all the other growth-choked cogs of the New West. Alpine peaks, salt lake, farmland, wetlands, desert, and cityscape literally collide, each in sight of the other. All along the 120-mile Wasatch Front incongruous landscapes and lifestyles lie in uneasy proximity, squeezed between the Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains and Great Salt Lake to the west. It’s a beautiful but troubled span. Eighty per- cent of Utah’s 2.2 million people live here. Most are jammed into Salt Lake Valley, which will swell to bursting this month when as many as 80,000 visitors a day descend for the 17-day winter Olympics. In 20 years another 800,000 people are projected to live along the Wasatch Front. Growing at more than twice the nation- al pace, the region faces two incompatible

92

truths—aridity and encroach- ing humanity.

This struggle has an added twist: Utah’s increase is largely homegrown. The state has the nation’s highest birthrate, due to a tradition of large fami- lies among the Mormons, who first settled this region in 1847 and today make up nearly 75 percent of the population.

“A good family is above all value,” said Jeff Rasmussen, a Mormon father of seven and part-time farmer who shares his faith along with his produce, no extra charge. We met ona prime October day at the home of Jeff’s par- ents in Draper, south of Salt Lake City. In the yard, families browsed through piles of pump- kins that Jeff had grown. His 87-year-old father, Sonne, tallied the buys with a pen on the palm of his hand. From her plastic chair on the porch, Jeff’s mother, Ramona, recited by heart the Mormon Articles of Faith: “We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevo- lent. ...” (She then gave me a pocket-size copy to keep.) Married for 66 years, Ramona and Sonne have watched rural Draper morph from sugar beet and egg capital to bobomtown—with predictable bittersweet effect. “At one time we knew everyone in Draper,” said Ramona, her voice trailing off.

Jeff, too, recounted the change as we stood among deer-gnawed remains of pumpkins in a field he leases for farming. On the surrounding hills tract homes gleamed, all new in the past few years. With roughly 800 homes a month

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

Delight in Earth’s bounty runs in the Rasmussen family. Proud of their rural Mormon roots, Jeff, at left, fears he'll be the last of the clan able to farm, as homes replace crops across the valley. “All the development breaks my heart,” says Jeff. “This is our corner of heaven.”

sprouting along the Wasatch Front, land prices have soared. “I can’t afford a piece big enough to park my car on,’ said Jeff. Though he granted the necessity of new homes for young families, he lamented the loss of a rural way of life. “I hate to think they'll dump asphalt on beautiful fields that God made fertile.”

God had a little help. A web of man-made irrigation canals began crisscrossing this valley as soon as the Mormon pioneers arrived, claiming this as their promised land. They planted crops, gardens, and lawns that were watered with diverted mountain streams and lowland rivers. “There’s a historic ethic that we were going to make this area blossom like a rose,” says Larry Anderson, director of the Utah Department of Water Resources. “That ethic continues to exist today.” But it carries a price.

SALT LAKE VALLEY

Lying at the eastern edge of the Great Basin desert, Utah is the nation’s second driest state yet has the second highest per capita water usage. Costly engineering projects pipe water from the Colorado River Basin into impound- ment reservoirs, where much of it evaporates into desert air. In Salt Lake Valley more than half the drinkable water supply is used to sprinkle residential gardens and lawns of Ken- tucky bluegrass. “We're planning to implement a conservation program,” says Anderson. “But that still won’t meet our needs.”

The pioneers’ needs were once met by the Jordan River, Salt Lake Valley’s largest water- way. Mormon settlers built the first irrigation dam on the river in 1872. Since then the river has been diverted, pumped, and straightened into near extinction.

93

A 44-mile link connecting Utah Lake to Great Salt Lake, the Jordan was down to a trickle in February, demanding more “butt scooting” than paddling from my guide Jeff Salt. A towering redhead with missionary zeal, Salt works for Great Salt Lake Audubon to help educate Utahns about the value of this riparian corridor. “The river once had oxbows, mean- dering channels, islands, marshes, and a wide floodplain,” said Salt. “Now it’s completely managed for humans and private property.” Polluted by farm waste, sewage, mining metals, runoff, and industry, “water quality is poor to horrible,” said Salt, who stopped to drag slimy boards and stray golf balls from the stream.

Yet the Jordan can still beguile. We reached a stretch of deeper water that riffled over gravel.

A canopy of willows framed the distant Wasatch canyons. Rounding a bend, we startled a flock of some two dozen courting pairs of great blue herons, which took to the sky in graceful sweeps. Spellbound by the birds, we crashed into an overhanging clump of sedge grass and spilled into the river, all of four inches deep. We named the spot Blue Heron’s Revenge.

or birds Salt Lake Valley has long been something of a promised land. Each year at least nine million waterbirds flock to the Great Salt Lake and its freshwater wetlands fed by the Jordan, Weber, and Bear Rivers. Designated as a site of hemispheric importance for migratory shorebirds, the lake is the single most critical inland bird habitat on

94

the continent, a nesting and refueling haven for migrants ranging from the Arctic to Argentina.

No one grasps the lake’s value to waterbirds better than Don Paul of Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources, who conducts an annual bird census on the lake. As we rumbled around its shores, he reeled off astounding statistics. The lake hosts the world’s largest breeding col- onies of California gulls and white-faced ibis, the largest number of snowy plovers in North America, a million northern pintails each year, 40,000 wintering tundra swans, and, some years, most of the world’s Wilson’s phalaropes, who gorge on the lake’s brine flies before wing- ing nonstop to South America. Pelicans, grebes, curlews, avocets—the list goes on. But the numbers are falling, down as much as 10 per- cent a year for some species.

Natural cycles account for some of the decline, habitat loss for much of the rest. “We're losing the peripheral wetlands where many of these birds forage,” Paul said as we drove through bur- geoning Davis County north of Salt Lake City. Pinched like the midsection of an hourglass between moun- tains and lake, the county has nowhere to grow but toward the wetlands. We passed row after row of new housing complexes with names like Quail Bluff. Many such newly developed areas were soggy and speckled with displaced birds during record flooding in the mid-1980s, when the lake bloated from its average size of 1,600 square miles to 2,300 square miles. If the lake rises again, the birds will have scant refuge.

It’s here at the choke point of the Wasatch Front that the 14-mile first leg of a proposed north-south freeway will pave over another 114 acres of wetlands. Supporters say that the controversial road, called Legacy Parkway, will help relieve traffic congestion, and they tout a mitigation plan that would establish a 2,100- acre wildlife preserve west of the highway. Opponents say the road will only invite more cars, sprawl, smog, and environmental degra- dation. “It’s depressing,” said Paul, as we stalled in traffic at 3 p.m. “Westerners love wide-open

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

A line drive away from a wetlands preserve, new homes near Layton typify the boom that’s

paving this valley. In Salt Lake City (facing page) developers raced to turn an old rail yard into

an urban village in time for the Olympics. Four million people may crowd the Wasatch Front in

the next 50 years, a projection that one water-use planner calls “pretty scary.” | |

Scarier still: Great Salt Lake's fluctuating shoreline is highly unpredictable. Mes Lake y

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VY Olympic venue ‘Ski area

About 80 percent of Utah’s population—

some 1.7 million people—lives along the Wasatch Front, on less than one percent

of the area of the state. Utah Scale veriee hile pocertive, . j Lake TERRAIN MODEL BY ROBERT STACEY, « £ ie WORLDSAT INTERNATIONAL INC. S

ead NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAPS

Training takes a twist at Utah Olympic Park, where freestyle skiers practice aerial moves. No-fly zones and a supply of the anti-anthrax drug Cipro will be among the unprecedented security measures designed to ease concerns about terrorist acts at the Winter Games. “I'm not really worried,” says gold medalist Eric Bergoust, below. “And | think it's really important that the games go on.”

spaces. But we’ve become settled in a big way.”

Great Salt Lake is one of the most wide-open and least understood spaces in the West. Roughly the size of Rhode Island, it’s a termi- nal lake with no outflow, averaging around 13 feet deep. Its depth and shoreline are highly variable, ruled largely by precipitation and evaporation. A nearly solid railroad causeway slices across it, dividing it into two arms whose waters barely mix. Because all the freshwater rivers that feed the lake enter the south arm, it can become diluted to as low as 4 percent salinity while the north arm is permanently saturated at between 26 and 28 percent. Far saltier than the sea, all this water is useless for irrigation. With scant allure for swimmers or boaters the lake is derided as a putrid, fly- infested sump, a dead thing.

Yet those who take time to know it can become enthralled by its life.

Off the glittering waters of the south arm lies an expanse of windblown desert, thou- sands of acres in a private Audubon reserve. It is intimately tended by naturalist Ella Soren- sen, who, with her rumpled tan sweater and piercing gaze, looks like a burrowing owl. “Most people see this dry area as a waste,” said Sorensen. “I see it as dormant, just waiting for its time to bloom.” Come spring this land will be a shallow sea alive with birds. In autumn it’s

“We welcome people. All we ask is that they look at the beauty here and respect it.”

a place of subtler beauties. We plucked leaves of crimson pickleweed and golden iodine bush, salt-tolerant halophytes that thrive here. Their bonsai shapes and fall hues perfectly mimicked the scrub oak on distant foothills. “People don’t realize the incredible diversity out here,” said Ella. She inhaled the silence and watched a hawk circle above undulant dunes. “The play goes on in spite of the near-empty seats.”

Out on the lake another unseen play occurs for four months each year—part slapstick,

98

part espionage, all drama. In October scores of hard-core commercial fishermen, most from Maine and Alaska, descend on this fishless lake to catch the infinitesimal eggs of brine shrimp, half-inch filter feeders that, next to brine fly larvae, are the larg- est life-form the salty lake can sustain. Brine shrimp eggs, or Artemia cysts, float on the water. Dried they can sit on a shelf for years; when rehydrated, they hatch into larvae used as food for prawn farms in Asia and South America. The highest quality aquaculture food in the world, Great Salt Lake Artemia cysts sold for as much as $35 a pound last year ona record harvest that yielded over four million dry pounds.

Among fishermen the word is out: This is the new gold rush. A battered guy named Kelly with hands as worn as old saddles told me he made $42,000 one season. Fish tale? Not likely. Others whispered figures a lot higher.

“If you don’t care about quality of life, it’s a great job,” joked Brad Marden, leader of one of the teams of fishermen granted permits to hunt eggs. A wild-eyed biologist, Marden was mobilizing for battle. At base camp on the tip of Promontory Point, powerboats bobbed on black water preparing for opening day. Crew- men slept aboard to thwart sabotage, which is common in this intensely competitive fishery.

Marden and I flew reconnaissance with Dan Beishline, one of three Alaska spotter pilots Marden’s team hired to locate eggs. From the air the north arm looked pink, tinted by the bacteria and algae that survive in these unbal- anced waters, and the south arm was bluish green. Cysts floated in rosy streaks or in swirls like hurricane clouds. Marden and Beishline were stunned by the amount of eggs. The year before there were so few that the fishery on the south arm was closed. That move— along with the lake’s salinity, the temperature, the shrimp,

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

—

al

ALIEN INVASION!

Walking billboard Travis Stobbe promotes a comedy at Park City’s annual Sundance Film Festival. The nonstop party draws hordes of trendy types locals call PIBs (people in black). More famous for white stuff (snow), the Park City area is the fastest growing spot in the Wasatch.

and the algae they eat—led to a rebound.

Opening day broke with a vengeance. Four- foot waves crashed against Promontory Point with the ferocity of a stormy sea. Fishermen need calm water to harvest cysts, which they encircle with floating booms then vacuum into sacks that hold up to 3,000 pounds. Idle crew- men looked grim at this inauspicious start.

A few days later the lake lay like gray satin, and the harvest was in full swing. In the sky Beishline scanned the water with binoculars, wrote down coordinates, and directed boat captains via radio. By speedboat Marden raced with a permit buoy to a patch of eggs, staking a claim for his team. Once that claim is made, no other team can harvest within 300 yards of the spot. When the harvest boat arrived, it laid the boom, corralled the eggs, and began to pump them aboard. This

SALT LAKE VALLEY

goes on 24 hours a day every day weather allows, a pace one fisherman called “inhumane.”

Marden and | headed out to check on a har vest boat that was sucking up eggs after dark. Karen, one of the few women who fish the lake, tended the hose, oblivious to the smear of cysts matting her hair. Her crewmate, Pat, sat grinning atop a bloated sack of eggs. “We're catchin’ mud!” he yelled as the cement-like sludge filled another sack. “It’s worth damn near more than gold!”

long the shore, lights gleamed in a tight

line defining Salt Lake Valley. Few

people who live there ever visit

the lake, feel its immensity, see how dawn and twilight play across the water. Instead they look eastward, and up, and see what

99

the world will see during the Olympics.

Beyond the temple spires and statehouse dome of Salt Lake City, the pinnacles of Mount Timpanogos top 11,750 feet, among the high- est peaks in the Wasatch. Blessed with lake- effect snows as dry as dust after crossing the desert, 11 ski areas lie less than an hour’s drive from the city, the largest urban area ever to host the Winter Games. After Salt Lake won its troubled bid in 1995, these ski areas—long the

exclusive terrain of local day-trippers—began racing to become year-round resorts that will lure back international visitors.

One lured long ago is Norwegian skiing leg- end Stein Eriksen, who won the gold for giant slalom at Oslo in 1952. Eriksen arrived in 1969, began promoting the “greatest snow on Earth,”

and then helped develop the Deer Valley Resort. “The beauty here is untouchable,” he says. “Everyone oohs and aahs when they come to the top of the lifts. We are in competition with other states for winter business, but Utah has been a sleeper for many years. The Olym- pics will allow us to be discovered by the world.”

The Snowbasin ski resort is banking on it. Host of the high-profile downhill and super-G events, this once sleepy haven of wide bowls, steep chutes, and panoramic views typifies the controversy that always follows when bull- dozers take to pristine lands.

To accommodate the games and transform Snowbasin into a four-season resort, owner Ear) Holding (who also owns Sinclair Oil and a ski resort in Sun Valley, Idaho) wanted a chunk

100

of the Wasatch-Cache National Forest at Snow- basin’s base. Utah Representative Jim Hansen and Senator Orrin Hatch facilitated this by shepherding a bill through Congress authoriz- ing a controversial land swap. The result: Hold- ing got nearly 1,400 public acres at Snowbasin (several times what was needed to build the resort). Olympic-related construction on that land is exempted from oversight under the National Environmental Policy Act—a deal that outrages environmentalists. In exchange for that land, Holding bought the Forest Ser- vice nearly 12,000 acres of private inholdings. The parcels “improve recreational access to the national forest,” says Doug Muir, a Forest Service lands officer. “I think the American people did very well.”

Far from the sound of nail guns and chairlifts I hiked the Lone Peak Wilderness Area in Little Cottonwood Canyon with Alexis Kelner, a founding member of Save Our Canyons, a Utah envi- ronmental group that op- posed the Snowbasin land swap. “These ski resorts are growing like a cancer,” said Kelner, who clearly prefers backcountry trails to black- diamond ski runs. Kelner fought for and helped win Lone Peak’s designation as Utah’s first wilderness area, granted in 1978. He’s been fighting ever since, largely to restrict development in Big and Little Cotton- wood Canyons, which provide more than a third of the drinking water for Salt Lake City.

“These canyons are part of the national forest, which was established in part to protect the watershed,” said Kelner as he led the way up a snow-padded trail. With the steady pace of a veteran hiker, he’d pause only briefly to rel- ish air fragrant with firs and spruce. Silence amplified the sounds of trickling water, crunching snow, and labored breathing. In time we reached a ridge above Red Pine Lake, a glacial remnant that adorned the mountain like an antique brooch. The mood of the peaks shifted with the movement of sunlight and mist. “Uncluttered mountains feed the soul,” said Kelner. (Continued on page 106)

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

“If you want to be outdoors, it's hard to imagine a better place,” says Douglas Heinrich (facing page). Touting easy access to varied terrain, he says, “Some want to keep this place

a secret.” The secret’s out, with mixed results. Motocross riders pound compacted fill on former wetlands. Globe-trotting hunter Bill Calfas (above, right) calls the Bear River Bird Club a “ten.” Birds might agree: More are protected than shot on the club’s 12,000 private acres.

Old West and new meet head-on as helicop- ters herd bison toward corrals at the annual roundup on Antelope Island, largest of ten islands in Great Salt Lake. Culled each year, the herd numbers some 500 head. Would-be cowboys (chosen by lottery) help chase bison and, if they're lucky, may catch a glimpse of roaming bighorn sheep and pronghorn.

. se 4 4 ® 99 M4 hh i } A i rs

a alg Oy fap AO!

Long shadows and a weary stride signal the end of a day of riding on Antelope Island for Justin Hokanson and his horse, Doc. “We must've covered 30 miles,” says the Idaho native, That's twice the length of this island, of the first Mormon ranch in the valley and now a state sae Rising to 6,600 feet, it

WILDERNESS ON THE EDGE

“4 ty &

sky

From this spot at 11,000 feet, the mountains look pristine, the valley far removed. Yet here developers plan to build a huge structure for skiers, visible for miles. Called Hidden Peak, the ridge symbolizes the region’s struggle to define the future of its alluring —and limited—lands.

A few hours later near the end of our descent we rounded a bend and saw towering concrete- and-glass condominiums, part of the Snow- bird resort. Snowbird is the largest of four resorts in the Cottonwoods, and it’s planning to get bigger. We rode Snowbird’s massive tram up to an 11,000-foot ridge named Hidden Peak. At the top, frigid wind blew, knee-deep snow sucked at our boots, and foul weather rolled in to obscure the view.

This is Kelner’s Waterloo. Here, on public land, the Forest Service has given Snowbird permission to build a 50,000-square-foot com- plex to enclose the tram and offer shopping, dining, and other amenities to skiers. Members of Save Our Canyons sued the Forest Service to stop the project, arguing that it violates ordinances prohibiting ridgetop development.

106

(They lost but won an injunction against construction pending appeal.) Dan Jiron, Salt Lake’s District Ranger, defends the permit: “The watershed has not been impaired, no wildlife values have been impaired, and visitors will have a better, safer experience because there’s a structure here.” It would be the highest ridgetop lodge on public land in the nation.

Across the ridge in Big Cottonwood Canyon Ellie Ienatsch voiced concerns about a domino effect. For 20 years the Salt Lake local has been hiking into these mountains to spy on elusive golden eagles. A self-taught expert on eagle behavior, she mapped their nest sites and per- suaded the Forest Service to ban ski helicopters from flying within a half mile of the nests. Ath- letically lean with a helmet of pewter hair, Ellie treaded secretively, obscuring her tracks. We

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

sat in a snowfield and shared binoculars, staring at the tan- gled branches of a nest sus- pended on a cliff. Suddenly an eagle swooped in and its mate flew out to forage, an aerial changing of the guard. “Either we save this now or it’s gone forever,” Ellie said. “If we lose the eagles, it’s one more step toward making the mountains a theme park.”

Some say the theme park has already arrived at nearby Park City in Summit County, ground zero for mountain sprawl. Less than one mile end to end, Park City’s Old Town is a charming jumble of shops and restaurants, where hungry skiers can plunk down $28 for caribou fajitas. Such upscale frills don’t impress local res- ident Ted Larremore, who bemoans the ersatz look of a new hotel that has risen across from the home he and his wife, Billie, bought in 1950. When they married here in °49, Park City was still a town of silver mines and saloons. Ted worked the mines. (“I left a couple of fingers and a couple of partners in there,” he said.) Billie worked the switchboard. They're grateful Park City has been saved from ghost town extinction by skiers, developers, and Hollywood wannabes who come for the annual Sundance Film Festi- val. But they question the abundance of shops, hotels, and palatial homes that crowd the hill- sides. “We welcome people,” said Ted. “All we ask is that they look at the beauty here and respect it.”

ar to the north, near the Idaho border,

I saw what Salt Lake Valley might have

been like before the squeeze was on. There, in the Bear River Valley, farms and fields breathe unfettered. In the rural town of Elwood, children romped in a potato field near an elbow of the Bear, which mirrored foothills in a chameleon coat of rusts and browns. At that point in the river's irrigation gantlet the mirror was small. It may become smaller still.

SALT LAKE VALLEY

Fearful that Salt Lake Valley will run dry in a few decades, the Utah Department of Water Resources is considering a plan to build a new dam on the Bear and pipe nearly 20 percent of its flow south to fast-growing counties along the Wasatch Front. The dam and resulting res- ervoir would inundate scores of farms for about a dozen miles upriver. That’s a future some are fighting to prevent.

“Diverting the Bear would have a huge cul- tural and ecological impact,” says Zach Frankel, founder of the Utah Rivers Council, an envi- ronmental group that opposes the dam. “It could dry up the largest wetland complex in the intermountain West.” He’s referring to the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, the nation’s first and largest waterfowl sanctuary. The Bear feeds the refuge, and from there its waters enter Great Salt Lake, providing the largest single source of fresh inflow. Few would deny that the Bear is vital to the health of the lake, its wet- lands, and the birds that depend on them. But there’s enormous contention over how to allo- cate its water in the parched years ahead.

Deep within the refuge the illusion of an unsullied West lived again. A coyote prowled an earthen berm. A red fox scratched in the sun. Pintails sculpted rippled Vs across endless marsh. And disparate landscapes, from snowy peaks to salt desert, seemed linked in harmony.

“The Olympics will allow us to be discovered by the world.”

Yet flying out of Salt Lake Valley, such beauties became invisible. Tarmac and fencing sliced across the mottled flatlands below. Siv Gillmor, matriarch of the ranching clan that works that land, explained why her family refuses lucra- tive offers to sell out. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” she said. “This land has its own charms. We've cared for it, we’ve survived, and we want to hang on.” Hers is the voice of the valley. Oo

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107

Taiikéstan 2 Turkmenistan Uzbekistan

CENTRAL ASIA

UNVEILED

Seven nations

caught in the glare of events prove as diverse and surprising as tomorrows headlines. BY MIKE EDWARDS

TYLER HICKS, GETTY IMAGES

NEW PLAYERS IN THE WORLD

-stan suffix \stan, stéin\ [Per.] 1: place, place of 2: land. Adopted into several languages from Persian, the court language employed in antique kingdoms of Central Asia. Thus the place or land of the Afghans is Afghanistan, the place of the Tajiks, Tajikistan.

stan

They are a diverse lot, these seven Stans. Only Kazakhstan, one of the five Stans born ten years ago in the breakup of the Soviet Union, seems likely to enjoy a prosperous future, thanks to enormous oil reserves. Someday Turkmenistan may also be rich—it has abundant natural gas— but for now it stagnates in one-man rule. Pakistan must be reckoned the most formidable Stan, possessing a large army and nuclear weapons to boot. It is also volatile and violent. Two of the ex-Soviet states, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, seem likely to become welfare nations, depending on the largesse of international lenders. After 23 years of conflict Afghanistan is the neediest of all, a gutted shell of a state with millions of land mines embedded in its earth.

The Stans’ common denominator is the harshness of their shared landscape, sweeps of desert and near desert riven by soaring mountain chains: the Hindu Kush, the Pamirs, the Safed Koh. Mountains mean life. Snowmelt feeds the rivers that support cities and farms; in Pakistan the Indus nourishes one of the most intensely irrigated regions on Earth. Engineers in the Soviet Stans harnessed the Amu Darya and Syr Darya to grow cotton on huge farms. The new nations still grapple with the aftereffects, land poisoned by agricultural chemicals and transformed into barren salt marshes.

In ancient times, the British historian Arnold Toynbee has written, Afghanistan was a “round- about,” a traffic circle, with routes converging “from all quarters of the compass and from which routes radiate out to all quarters of the compass again.” Those routes—silk roads and spice roads arcing across mountain passes, leaping from spring to well to river valley—knitted Afghanistan

and the other Stans into a single skein. Mighty conquerors strode these routes: Cyrus and Darius

Toothy borders carve _ of blood spilled in independent nations. up a region shaped conflict. Their collec- | A decade later

by centuries of socio- tive population of they're all strug- political upheaval. almost 230 million gling with

Covering an area people exceeds drought, poverty, more than two-thirds Russia’s by more and internal

larger than the Euro- _ than half. Yet prior strife. With Af-

pean Union, the to 1991 the map ghanistan in “Stans” weave an showed only Afghan- turmoil, the world Asian carpet of many _ istan and Pakistan. has turned a curious colors: blue of the Then came the eye on these enig- Caspian Sea, goldof Soviet breakup and matic countries. desert sands, and red the birth of five Who are the Stans?

110

of Persia, Alexander, Attila, Mahmud, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Babur. MORE ON OUR WEBSITE

The number of dynasties domestic and foreign grew to more than a score. _| Mike Edwards remembers his Peace Corps days in Kabul

in the 1960s at nationalgeo bloody conqueror who became an evangelist of peace, renouncing the graphic.com/ngm/0202. AOL Keyword: NatGeoMag

From India in the third century B.c. came Buddhism with Asoka, a

killing of any living thing. Buddhism endured for hundreds of years, time enough and more for artisans to carve soaring Buddhas in the rock of Bamian—statues gone forever, the last two destroyed by Taliban dynamite in March of last year.

In turn, the Buddhists were engulfed by Islam, first brought eastward to Iran by Arabs, then to the Stans beginning about a.p. 700. Though still mainly Islamic, the Stans practice markedly dif- ferent versions of the faith. In Pakistan conservative mullahs exhort street crowds with strident anti-U.S. rhetoric. Islam in the ex-Soviet Stans is mostly moderate, even lax. Uzbekistan, applying harsh Soviet-era rules, has jailed thousands of Muslims out of fear of an Islamic uprising aimed at supplanting the secular government.

The Stans are shot through with such issues of human rights and governance.

Pakistan is again under military rule. Rigid Soviet ways (one-party rule, a smothered press) have not vanished from the former Soviet regions. For most of the Stans the road to democracy looks long and uphill. Security may be no closer.

Nor peace.

THE NEEDIEST

Flash Point

A foiled democracy gave way to 23 years of war that reduced the nation to ruins. Decades will pass before the

wounds are healed.

Afghans call it the “decade of

democracy.” In a wildly optimistic break with the past, King Moham- mad Zahir Shah, whose family had ruled the Afghans for two centu- ries, set out in 1963 to transform his backward nation into a mod- ern state. In 1964 he summoned 452 tribal leaders, religious fig- ures, and intellectuals to a jirgah, a traditional Afghan convocation, to ratify a constitution making the nation a constitutional monar- chy. The next year an elected par- liament convened. Kabul, the capital, hummed with excitement. Catching the spirit, the members became as bold as their monarch,

heaping criticism on government ministers.

Meanwhile, the government was encouraging women to shed the all-enveloping chadri. The constitution guaranteed them equality. They enrolled in Kabul University, just being enlarged with U.S. aid. Women won elec- tion to parliament. In government offices, a male domain, others be- gan to sit before strange machines called typewriters. Some were learning to drive.

Aid money poured in. Both the Soviet Union and the U.S. built highways. The U.S. financed a vast irrigation system in the Helmand

River Valley. Teachers came from the U.S., France, Germany, the U R. Among them were Peace Corps volunteers who taught lan- guages, math, sciences, medicine,

nursing, accounting, and secretar- ial skills. The Soviets built apart- ments and trained the army.

It was a heady, wild, wonderful time. At least in Kabul. The liberal wave that began in 1963 did not reach the countryside. Most roads were rutted tracks. The telephone was a novelty, TV unknown. Fewer than 10 percent of rural Afghans could read or write.

In Kabul the parliament squab- bled, criticized, but seldom passed

Boys helped shoulder the burden of war for the Northern

Alliance. This loose coalition of diverse ethnic groups stood against the Taliban.

Afghani

laws. The new freedoms embold- ened communists to demonstrate, promote strikes, and demand faster reform. Conservatives be- gan to have second thoughts about democracy.

In 1973 Zahir Shah was over- thrown by his cousin, Daoud, a hot-tempered autocrat. The king went into exile in Rome as Daoud abolished the parliament and ended the decade of democracy. In 1978 came another coup: Afghan communists, possibly guided by Moscow, assassinated Daoud and

took over. Thus began the 23 years of terrible warfare.

Could the optimism of that decade ever return? Consider the arithmetic of Afghanistan: A mil- lion and a half people killed. Nearly four million living as refu- gees, including most of the veneer of educated men and women. Land mines preventing the use of thousands of acres of precious farmland. Kabul all but destroyed, the university in rubble. High- ways, bridges—gone. Experts say it will take at least a decade to re- build Afghanistan merely to its spare 1960s development level. And many more years to bring it into the 21st century.

Omi 200 | ee mee: . Okm 200

NG MAPS

POPULATIO 26.8 million

ITAL Kabul LANGUAGES Persian (Dari) 50% Pashtu 35% Turkic 11% Other 4% ETHNIC GR Pashtun 38% Tajik 25% Hazara 19% Other 18% RELIGIONS Sunni Muslim 84% Shiite Muslim 15% Other 1% LITERACY RATE 32% (lowest in the Stans) LIFE EXPEC

46.2 years

(lowest in the Stans) INFANT fi ALITY 147 per 1,000 births (highest in the Stans) TOTAL AREA

250,001 square miles IN BRIEF

After the Taliban's defeat, women could return to work, to school, and to the streets unescorted.

Jalalabad Khyber Pass Safed Koh Range

THE WEALTHIEST

Rich Future

Deposits of oil and gas—if combined with wise govern- ment—promise

immense wealth.

The face of the future projects hope for Kazakhs who a dec- ade ago returned from Soviet exile in Mongolia. Today Kazakh power plants sell energy to Russia.

The cash is rolling in: 12 billion dollars in foreign investment in the ten years since Kazakhstan became independent and almost 5 billion dollars in 2000 alone from sales of oil.

The largest of the five ex-Soviet Stans (think Texas x 4), Kazakh- stan seems likely to also be the wealthiest. The Soviet Union scarcely explored Kazakhstan’s oil deposits; now these deposits seem to never stop growing. A newly tested field in the Caspian Sea raises estimates of the coun- try’s total proven reserves to as high as 17.6 billion barrels. That approaches the total U.S. reserves, 22 billion barrels.

Even China’s national petro- leum corporation has joined the multinational companies rushing to Kazakhstan with investment cash. Pipelines already carry oil to the West via Russia, and more

pipelines are on the way. Plenty of natural gas will be flowing too, once a transport system is in place.

The average Kazakh hasn’t seen much of the wealth that swells government coffers. To be sure, there are more jobs; thousands of workers have been building the new capital, Astana, in the arid steppe. (It replaces Almaty, once a fortress of Russian Cossacks.) But critics describe a developing “en- clave economy” in which money pours into the oil-and-gas indus- try or benefits a coterie of officials and allies of President Nursultan Nazarbayev. The national unem- ployment rate is 14 percent; in cit- ies away from the oil fields it’s as high as 50 percent.

Inevitably, perhaps—since cor- ruption is a fact of life in the Stans—amillions of dollars paid in 1997 by U.S. companies seeking oil concessions ended up in Swiss

GERD LUDWIG (ABOVE); IAN BERRY, MAGNUM PHOTOS

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

banks, in accounts that investiga- tors say were controlled by Kazakh officials, including Nazarbayev. In the West that’s called a scandal; in Kazakhstan's intimidated press it hardly got a mention. Personal information about the president is by law a state secret. Publications that have dared criticize him on other matters have been sued or their print runs and equipment have been confiscated.

Nazarbayev was the last Kazakh Com munist Party boss,

before the Soviet Un- ion’s collapse, and has been the new nation’s only winning reelection in 1999. Critics called the election flawed; for one thing Nazar- bayev’s strongest op-

leader, easily

ponent was_ barred from running by Na- zarbayev’s courts. He controls the parliament as well as the courts—the old Soviet way. Still, his regime is less repressive than those of neighboring Uzbek- istan and Turkmenistan. The Kazakhs—Turkic whose included the Mongols of Genghis Khan—are

tribes

forebears

the most Russified major group in Central Asia. Russia began to expand into their territory in the 1700s; other had little contact with Russians until a century later. Land-hungry peasants poured into the steppe in the late 19th century. In the 1930s and °40s trains brought

entral Asian peoples

thousands of people that the dictator Joseph Stalin didn’t trust, such as Germans from the Volga region along with Koreans from the Soviet Far East. Yet another wave of set- tlers arrived in the 1950s to plow the steppe in the Virgin

THE STANS

tFort Lt

Shevchenko — — —

Kazakh

Lands program, an ill-fated at- tempt to grow wheat in semidesert conditions.

As they did in other Stans, the Soviets set out to eradicate the local culture. They burned Kazakh books, executed leaders or sent

them to the gulag, and collectiv- ized the farmfolk. Small wonder that many Kazakhs lost touch with their culture and today speak Rus- sian better than their own Turkic language.

Now there’s a new culture, of wealth from oil and gas. Perhaps some day there will be a culture of democracy; the government boasts of Kazakhstan’s “thriving nascent democracy.” Nascent is the operative word, indeed.

, ikonur Cosmodror

cagnnnaered

pi

POPUL

14.8 million

CAPITAL

Astana

(was Almaty, Land of the Apples, until 1997) LANGUAGE

Russian 6

Kazakh 40%

ETHNIC GROUPS Kazakh 53%

Russian 30% Ukrainian 4%

Other 13

RELIGIONS

Muslim 47%

Russian Orthodox 44% Protestant 2%

Other 7%

TALITY

59 per 1,000 births TOTAL AREA

1,049,155 square miles IN BRIEF

This country remains Closely tied to Russia, with which it shares a 4,250-mile border. In 2001 most of Kazakhstan's annual oil production—some 250 million barrels—was shipped through Russia.

pO ® Khan Tangiri 22,950 ft 6,995 m

THE MOST TRADITIONAL

Strong Roots

A rural legacy endures

in this mountain-

a challenge to a leader

Ghosts of com- munism rest eternal in eastern Kyrgyz- stan. Under Soviet rule religion was suppressed. But Muslims displayed crude sickles that also evoke the crescent moon— symbol of Islam.

encircled land, posing

No Kyrgyz fe: until a singer rises to intor zas from the longest narrative in world literature, The Epic of Manas bulges with half a million lines of

ival is complete tan-

ve Purportedly a thousand years old, it’s both the story of a Kyrgyz folk hero—that’s Manas— and a hymn to freedom, valor, and the unity of the Kyrgyz tribes.

Scholars aren’t certain Manas lived. No matter. In the wor of Kyrgyzstan’s president, A: Akayev, the narrative is tual foundation . . . our pride, our strength, and our hope.”

Under the Soviets the epic was banned in schools, except for parts rewritten to conform to Soviet ideology; in Kyrgyzstan as

IONAL GEOGRAPHIC,

elsewhere Moscow — suppressed ethnic tradition and pride. But Soviet authority did not easily penetrate the soaring Pamir and Tian Shan mountain ranges, and the Kyrgyz who lived there clung to their roots. Shepherds sang of Manas around their campfires and parents handed down verses to their children.

Annexed to in as part of Russiz i territory of the Kyrgyz became a Soviet republic in 1936. The So- viets renamed the capital Frunze, for a general of the Russian Rev- olution. After 1991 the Kyrgyz took back the city’s original name, Bishkek, which is said to mean “five knights.” Legend holds that

1876

FEBRUARY 2002

the knights fought one another to possess the enticing site, a valley beneath shimmering mountains. Today it’s hard to imagine knights squabbling over a raffish Soviet-style apartment blocks, the home of many of the 603,000 Russians who remain in Kyrgyzstan.

All told, Russians are 13 per cent of the population. Another 300,000 departed, often complaining that jobs were be- ing “Kyrgyz-fied.” To encourage skilled technicians to remain, the post-Soviet government in 1996

city of

have

recognized Russian as an official language alongside Kyrgyz, which, like Uzbek and Turkmen, is a Turkic tongue.

THE STANS

Kyrgyzstan’s mountains haven't insulated the nation from the turmoil afflicting its neighbors. Bands of guerrillas, part of a rad- ical movement that aspires to create Islamic states, have infil trated from neighboring Tajiki stan, taking hostages and battling Kyrgyz troops.

President Akayev has some- times used Soviet methods, muz zling critical and harassing and arresting political

opponents or disqualifying them

newspapers

from seeking office. Akayev’s own reelection in 2000 was tarnished by stuffed ballot boxes and voter intimidation. Despite state restric tions, an independent press and opposition parties survive.

Irying to shift to a market economy, the Akayev government transformed Soviet-era factories and other enterprises into share holder companies. But few have been able to find markets, and the government needs cash as it grap ples with high unemployment, inflation, and potholed roads.

Central Asian say that Kyrgyzstan, already a debtor nation, will need continual shor- ing up by international lending agencies. The Manas legend may indeed be the country’s spiritual foundation; unfortunately, it doesn’t pay the bills.

experts

Kyrgyz

4.8 million

Bishkek

Kyrgyz and Ru

in (no

breakdown available)

Kyrgyz 65%

Uzbek 14%

Russian 13% Other 8%

Muslim 75%

Russian Orthodox

Other 5%

77 per 1,000 births

76,641 square miles

The Epic of Manas

recounts the tale of a

medieval tribal leader's

land for the Turkic people

and of feasts where

guests

‘ate mountains

meat and drank lakes of

kumiss,” still a favored beverage of fermented

mare's milk. Says one

expert, “The Kyrgyz think

of themselv

as the

poets and artists of

Central Asia”

Jengish Chokusu (Pik Pobedy) 24,406 ft 7,439 m

THE MOST VOLATILE

Wild Card

Power broker—or powder keg for a

region in chaos?

Capitalism thrives at a makeshift grocery on the Karakoram Highway and in the streets of Rawalpindi. Set up by the British in 1947, Pakistan blends East and West.

It’s been called a powder keg and a failing state—“a cat that has used up several of its lives,” in the words of one U.S. expert.

The economy is flagging, edu- the fourth time since Pakistan came

cation is a shambles. For into existence 54 years ago, the army in 1999 ousted the elected took Afghanistan’s wars have flooded

government and control. Pakistan with weapons, spawning a “Kalashnikov culture,” a propen- sity to settle disputes with modern weaponry, even grenade launch- ers. Shoot-outs between political parties, or between civilians and police or soldiers, are common in the port city of Karachi, now swollen to 12 million people.

In 1947 Pakistan was created as

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC,

a Muslim homeland in the parti- tion of British India. The name is an acronym, coined from some of the new land’s regions: Punjab, Afghania (the North-West Fron- tier), Kashmir, and Indus-Sind. Pak happens to mean “pure” in Urdu, the official language. Thus Pakistan is “land of the pure.” Punjab Province, with 59 per- cent of the population, is so dom- inant in politics that Baluchi and Pashtun, the peoples of the North- West Frontier, bristle at the “Punjabization” of the nation and demand autonomy. The Pashtun intensify the difficulties, for their homeland is divided by an artifi cial boundary drawn by the Brit ish in 1893. About 11 million live in Pakistan and perhaps the same

BOTH BY ED KASHI

FEBRUARY 2002

number in Afghanistan, where they are the major population group. Over the years Pashtun on both sides have raised the “Pash- tunistan” issue, as it’s called, demanding a merger of all Pash- tun or at least a plebiscite to decide what nation they will be part of. As Afghanistan stirred this issue in the 1960s, Pakistani officials con- cluded their nation was boxed in by enemies—on the east by India (with whom Pakistan has fought two wars over Kashmir)

and on the west by Afghanistan.

Whatever the future regime in Kabul, Pakistan probably will try to dominate it.

-akistan has the means to dom- inate; its military, 620,000 strong, is by far the largest in the Stans. And it has the bomb, as it proved in test explosions in 1998, answer- ing India’s nuclear tests.

Defense gets about 30 percent of the government budget. Edu- cation receives less than a tenth as much—even though almost half the nation’s 145 million citizens are under the age of 15. Few rural girls receive any education at all. More and more, families send

THE STANS

Paki

their sons to thousands of schools called madrasahs that may dis- pense an ultraconservative version of Islam and little else. Many madrasahs also foment hatred of the U.S., calling the attack on the Taliban and Osama bin Laden one of a long list of U.S. offenses against Islam.

The U.S. was once Pakistz closest ally, and many Pakistanis probably still respect their old friend. But the relationship could become problematic as Pakistan stumbles toward its uncertain future, carrying its nuclear baggage.

Arabian Sea

POPULATION

144.6 million

CAPITAL

Islamabad LANGUAGES

Punjabi, variants 58% Sindhi 12%

Pashtu 8%

Urdu 8%

Other 14%

ETt

Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashtun, Baluchi, Muhajir iaeieiit

Sunni Muslim 77% Shiite Muslim 20% Other 3%

LIFE EXPE

61.5 years

INFANT MORTALITY

81 per 1,000 births

TOTAL AREA

307,374 square miles IN BRIEF

Nearly two-thirds of the population of all the Stans lives in Pakistan, the world's second most populous Muslim country, after Indonesia.

Boundary claimed by India IN K2 (Godwin Austen) 28,251 ft 48.6l1 m

Boundary undefined

h THE WEAKEST { 4

Crippled Nation

Besieged by famine, poverty, and wat ring clans, the smallest Stan is losing its struggle

to. survive.

The calm of an empty street in Yoged belies the trauma of empty stomachs plaguing Tajikistan, now in its third year of drought. International relief helps sustain people in villages like Shahr- tuz, where women and children gather to receive food.

ag *

It was the poorest republic in all the Soviet Union. Soon after inde- pendence in 1991 it was plunged into a civil war in which at least 50,000 people died. Most of its trained manpower fled. It’s easy to see why some Central Asian experts call Tajikistan a crippled nation that will have a hard time surviving without foreign help. Tajiks are of Persian stock and speak a Persian dialect. They make up 65 percent of the country’s 6.6 million people; most of the rest are Uzbeks who mainly live in Tajikistan’s slice of the F

Valley in the north. Many Tajiks kin the border in n Afghanistan. While most ajikistan Tajiks practice Islam, the

have north of the a moderate form of

across

mountains of their nation have been a hiding place for extremist Muslim guerrillas who have raided into Uzbekistan.

Tajikistan’s challenges begin with terrain. Ninety-three percent of the Arkansas-size nation is mountainous. Most of the arable 6 percent was long tilled by state farms that were required to grow cotton. It remains the major crop, but yields and prices have fallen.

Bombs occasionally explode in Dushanbe, the capital. Assassins gun down political leaders and kill Auch of the

others for revenge. violence is the aftermath of the

civil war, a tangled, chaotic, multi- sided power struggle that contin- ued until a cease-fire was signed in 1997, with occasional subsequent eruptions. The fighters: bands of

re

RICHARD WAYMAN, CORB!

communists, Tajik clans, a small Islamic force, and warlords. The warlords were also trying to seize the nation’s meager assets, such as textile mills, for themselves. Russia sent troops in 1992, ostensibly to try to halt the fighting and per- haps to extend its influence in Central Asia. The Russian Army presence is still large.

Elections in 1994 gave the pres- idency to Imomali Rakhmonov, a former state farm boss. Critics say he is allied with militia leaders who control regions of the coun- try and sometimes commandeer businesses. Some commanders may be smuggling opium from Afghanistan, in recent years the world’s number one producer.

Tajikistan’s biggest industry is a huge aluminum smelter built by the Soviets. Dams on mountain streams generated the necessary electricity, but the ore, bauxite, had to be transported from abroad by ship and rail.

THE STANS

SYGMA (ABOVE): JAMES HILL. GETTY IMAGES smelter still limps along, 120 mil- lion dollars in deb

The best hope for Tajikistan may be development of small farms and orchards. The govern- ment has allowed some farmers to go private, and many have pros- pered. The Aga Khan Foundation, a charity active in Central Asia, has seen crop yields double among farmers who modest loans for seed, fertilizer, and irri- gation projects.

Otherwise, not much good news

received

emerges from Tajikistan. Barring a miracle, it will remain poor, and perhaps unstable as well.

a Fergana LZ Valley Ay

Qurghor

Shahrtyy si

Former name in parenthe Or

6.6 million

Dushanbe

Tajik, Russian (no breakdown available) Tajik 65%

Uzbek 25%

Russian 3%

Other 7%

Sunni Muslim 80% Shiite Muslim 5% Other 15%

64,2 years

116 per 1,000 births

55,251 square miles

Tajikistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. Eighty percent of the people live below the poverty line of 17 dollars a month. Tajiks speak a Persian dialect, one of the few in the former Soviet Stans, When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, Tajikistan

felt connected to Iran culturally and historically, while the other Soviet Stans (all Turkic speakers) associated with Turkey. Today many Tajiks get their news by tuning in to Radio Tehran.

THE MOST DESPOTIC

One-man

Stan

A president wields kinglike powers, shackles freedoms, and splurges on

luxuries.

Whether slaughter- ing a sheep or tend- ing tomato fields, villagers wring life from a land that is four-fifths desert. Ample oil and gas may one day bring riches.

A nation of vast potential, with huge reserves of oil and natural gas, Turkmenistan in the ten years since independence has failed to escape from economic mire and harsh Soviet-style control. President-for-life Saparmurat Niyazov headed the Turkmen Communist Party before the Soviet Union broke up. Now it’s called the Democratic Party. It’s the only one allowed. Opponents have been thwarted by arrests and harassment. The press is rigidly censored, and state-owned Turk- men Telecom is the sole Internet provider, allowing the government to monitor electronic mail. Niyazov was unopposed for president in 1992, in the first election after independence. Sub- sequently his rubber-stamp par- liament, the Majlis, decreed that he could remain in office indef- initely. Nowhere in the former

Soviet Stans is the cult of the ruler more intense. The president, who prefers to be called Turkmenbashi, Leader of the Turkmen, has put his likeness on everything from the currency to the local vodka. The main airport is named for him, and so is a city on the Cas- pian Sea. In Ashgabat, the capital, his gilded statue rotates atop a spire, one revolution every 24 hours. At dawn his outstretched arms reach southeast toward Afghanistan. By noon he faces Iran, and as night falls he is gazing north toward Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Turkmenbashi has steered a

neutral course through the re- gion’s upheaval, and no guerrillas, Taliban spawned or otherwise, are known to have intruded. Turk- menistan cultivates the friendship of its neighbors in hope of mar- keting its great store of natural

gas—possibly the fifth largest

(@ reserve in the world—and its petroleum. Iran has received Turk- UJ l ii e f men gas since 1998, and much of

it goes to Ukraine and other ex- Soviet nations via Russian pipes. But Russia has refused to trans- port Turkmen gas to hard-currency nations, retaining the European market for itself. Plans for a pipe- line across Afghanistan to Paki- stan, of great potential benefit to those Stans as well as to Turkmenistan, foundered because of Afghanistan’s tur- moil. Another pipe- line is more of a pipe dream and would pass under the Cas- pian Sea to Turkey.

In all, energy ex- ports bring in about 600 million dollars a year, far short of what the president expected when he promised to make Turkmenistan the “Kuwait of Central Asia,” with free bread and a Mercedes for every family.

Lack of funds, however, didn’t deter Turkmenbashi from launch- ing a radical makeover of Ashga- bat, ripping out homes in the center of the city to get a site for his huge new marble palace. On the outskirts of the capital he built some 30 hotels that hardly ever host a visitor. With such splurges the government has run up a 2.3- billion-dollar foreign debt.

The average wage earner, mean- while, takes home about $30 a month. Men fortunate enough to own an old Russian Volga—far from a Mercedes—moonlight as taxi drivers to earn extra cash.

Traditional nomads, Turkmen trace their origins to Turkic- speaking tribes that migrated from Mongolia and Siberia in the eighth century. During the Soviet

THE STANS

era Moscow decreed that the Turkmen, like their neighbors the Uzbeks and Tajiks, must settle down on farms and grow cotton for Russian mills. Canals siphoned water from the Amu Darya and smaller rivers in the Turkmen

BOTH BY JAMES HL republic and sent it across great swaths of the Garagum desert. The consequences were dire. Inef- ficient irrigation, especially leak- age from canals, has created more than two million acres of useless salt marshes.

Yet nearly half of the workforce in this nation of great potential wealth still seeks a meager living from agriculture, picking cotton by hand, with few if any benefits accruing from Turkmenbashi’s one-man rule.

4.6 million

Ashgabat

Turkmen 72% Russian 12% Uzbek 9% Other 79 Nie

Turkmen 77% Uzbek 9% Russian 7 Kazakh 2% Other 5%

Muslim 89' Eastern Orthodox 9% Other 2%

61 years

73 per 1,000 births

188,456 square miles

Some carpet experts believe Turkmen rugs are the descendants of the purest and oldest of all carpet-weaving traditions in Central Asia. The rugs are misnamed Bukhara after the town where they were sold in neighboring Uzbekistan

3,139 im

an ironclad grip on the press-and political foes.

Blunting the assaults of history since the 16th century, the Ark Citadel repels the elements on a winter day in Bukhara. Showing similar resolve, locals in Khiva bundle up and eat out. With no appetite for religious militants, the gov- ernment has adopted a fortress mentality toward radical Islam.

It’s risky to be a pious Muslim in Uzbekistan. The security forces have cracked down so hard on sus- pected Muslim militants that men come under suspicion who merely grow a beard or who belong to a religious family.

Thousands have been arrested. A U.S. State Department human

rights report cites case after case of

suspects who were beaten in jail, were forced to sign bogus confes-

sions, or died in custody.

The Uzbek government blames Muslim militants for a series of explosions in Tashkent, the capital,

aN \

Following old Soviet ways, the government keeps

in 1999—apparently an attempt to assassinate President Islam Karimov—and for guerrilla at- tacks in the Fergana Valley, the richest farming area. The largest radical group, said to have a few thousand fighters, calls itself the Is- lamic Party of Turkistan, using the name once applied to a broad swath of Central Asia. It has vowed to install Islamic regimes not only in secular Uzbekistan but in all the neighboring Stans as well.

Raids and acts of terrorism are the reason the Uzbek government gives for its harsh treatment of men who appear to be devout Muslims. Critics say many of those arrested are innocent, merely fol- lowing their faith, and that some are political opponents of Pres- ident Karimov.

Like their neighbors the Kazakhs, Uzbeks are a Turkic people who mixed with the conquering Mon- gols of Genghis Khan. They have managed to hold on to their

culture better than the Kazakhs, and they’re proud that in the 10th to 15th centuries the cities of Sam- arqand, Bukhara, and Khiva nour- ished poets, mathematicians, and astronomers. The savage warrior Tamerlane, born near Samarqand, is a national hero, admired as a conqueror who ruled from Persia to India. Agriculture is gest employer, and cotton is king, as it was in Soviet days, when irri-

Izbekistan’s big-

gation canals were stitched across

0 BARREY, MAGNUM PHOTOS (ABOVE); GUEORG!

the arid landsca water became pol chemicals. State fa relics, have not

pe and ground- luted with agro- arms, also Soviet been abolished,

and the government still tells farmers what to plant: cotton. The system enriches the

state at the expense of the peasants, for the crop must

be sold to the state at a fraction

of its value. Nearly half of Uzbekistan’s 25 million people, a population

THE STANS

yn

25.2 million

Tashkent (only Stans city with a subway) \NGUAGE Uzbek 74% Russian 14% Tajik 4% Other 8%

Uzbek 80%

Russian 6%

Tajik 5%

Kazakh 3%

Other 6%

(most ethnically diverse of the Stans)

REL

Muslim 88%

Eastern Orthodox 9% Other 3%

all have a basic education (give the TERACY RATE Soviet system credit for encour- 99% (highest in all the aging universal schooling). But Stans)

jobs are scarce, and inevitably IF ECT

some of the jobless are attracted to 63.8 years militant Islam. As a U.S. official F NO said: “They go off to Pakistan to study religion [where many Tali- ban leaders studied], and they go 172,742 square miles from learning about the Koran to f

learning about Kalashnikovs.” [J

almost half that of the five former Soviet Stans, are under 18. Nearly

72 per 1,000 births

Some Muslims here practice Sufism, a mystical, less political form of Islam.

Adelunga Toghi 14,10 ft 4,301 m,

TASHKENT if Namangan

UZBEKISTAN Andijon

Fergana Valley

3:00 p.m. Sheppard McHenry and Susan Likowsk!

- 126

11

ELKTON, MARYLAND

Amiable citizens walking quiet streets with an easy air—the generics of small-town America—make Elkton, Maryland, not much different from other towns scattered above the northern reaches of the Chesapeake Bay. Then why do thousands of people travel here each year to get married, even folks of prominence from times gone by? Ethel Merman, Bert Lahr, Joan Fontaine, and Cornel Wilde, movie stars; John Eisenhower, son of Ike; John Mitchell, former attorney general; singers Billie Holiday, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and Maxene Andrews of the Andrews Sisters; and sports luminaries—Willie Mays, baseball, Jersey Joe Walcott, boxing, and Charles Barkley, basketball. What swirl of grav- ity draws them to Elkton, population 12,000, zip code 21921?

Answers are sought at the fire department’s annual antique sale, where a visitor inquires after a certain Mr. .. . “Dixon?” responds Don Herring, ticket taker and retired editor of The Cecil Whig. “I think I saw the sheriff taking him away.” Kermit DeBoard, an antiques dealer, points to a tall man in a striped shirt loitering near the stemware. “Looks like he’s stealing something,” DeBoard says. The veins of drollery run deep here, it seems.

Confronted, the suspect identifies himself as Mike Dixon, historian of the Historical Society of Cecil County. We sit to slices of Impossible Pie, served by Nancy Caldwell, who explains that it is just impossible not to make it taste good, Dixon harkens back to 1913, the year neighboring Delaware imposed a four-day waiting period on marriages. Maryland had no such waiting period, no blood test, no nothing to delay the union of eager couples heading south from Delaware into Maryland. “Elkton was the first county seat they hit,” says Dixon. When the word got around, more couples began arriving from other states to the north, In 1936 the town issued 11,791 marriage licenses. Taxi drivers met trains and buses and vied for couples in competition that sometimes included

2:00 p.m. Rose Ann Wright and Taurus Hollis

zp 4:00 p.M. Kelly Underwood and

“lve done 35,000 marriages, give or take, in 18 years,” says Janice Potts.

Movie stars, athletes, and just plain folks have exchanged vows before Janice Potts, deputy clerk at the courthouse. Once, Maryland's lax marriage law drew elopers. Now nostalgia guides nuptials.

Edward Taylor’ — «

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It’s the

STRENGTH OF A DOG'S TEETH.

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ELKTON, MARYLAND

knockdown fights. The cabbies delivered their trophies to favorite min- isters in about a dozen small marriage chapels.

“Marriage, that’s what the town lived on,” says Tony Trotta, a barber on Main Street. “Everybody was making money.” When Trotta began cutting hair here in 1935, the shop contained a jewelry store. He chuck- les. “A man could stop in for a haircut, a shave, and a wedding ring.”

Maryland voted in a two-day waiting period in 1938, and the con- nubial tide ebbed. Elkton felt the pinch, even the historical society. Seek- ing revenue, Mike Dixon and a cohort started a program of Ghost Walks to lure frisson-seeking tourists to sorties through dark cemeteries and creaky houses—who does not shiver before the ghost of Holly Hall? This spacious, redbrick residence was built in the early 1800s.

Helen Warburton’s Chesapeake Bay retriever apparently got the shiv- ers. Mrs. Warburton ran the United Way from her office in Holly Hall and remembers the dog peering up the stairs one day, growling, “every hair on her back standing up.” Mrs. Warburton, a pillar of the commu- nity, saw nothing. “The dog saw something,” she soberly maintains. “I don’t believe it was a living person.” Could it have been the spirit of a pa- triot—as some believe—banished by his Tory father from Holly Hall?

Now it is time for frissons of a different kind. Today is Valentine’s Day, and despite a weeping drizzle, Cupid is back in town. Thirty couples, drawn here by Elkton’s reputation as the marrying place, will plight troth, 21 in the courthouse and nine in the one remaining wedding chapel. Cooling in the chapel parlor while his bride Linda Whitman primps upstairs, John Reading displays socks with hearts and a brave red tie, chosen by Linda, he says. John is reluctant to reveal another item Linda picked for him—silk boxer shorts emblazoned with red hearts on a field of black. “He’s a Harley man,” says Linda. “He can deal with it.”

Later, Sheppard McHenry and his bride, Susan Likowski, with her

Arnie and Cheryl Berger

Annapolis

POPULATION: 12,000 MARRIAGES: 2,000 annually

HITCHED HERE: Billie Holiday, singer; Pat Robertson, evangelist; John Mitchell, former U.S. attorney general; Charles Barkley, basketball player; Jersey Joe Walcott, boxer; José Capablanca, chess champion.

BEST WHAT?: A couple once brought their cat— dead and stuffed—to serve as “best man.”

NAME: Known early on as “Head of Elk,” for its location between Big Elk and Little Elk Creeks

Still each other's Valen- tine, the Bergers came to the Little Wedding Chapel to renew their vows after ten years of marriage.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, FEBRUARY 2002

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ELKTON, MARYLAND

daughter, April, are accompanied by a three-year-old ring bearer named Emma, who tires during the ceremony and goes to sleep at the couple’s feet. At the appropriate time Emma surrenders the rings, fastened to a collar around her neck. Emma rears enthusiastically and places her fore- legs around the bride’s neck and licks her face. Emma is a Great Dane.

At the courthouse across the street Janice Potts, deputy clerk, has married 15 couples before lunch. Then Leonard Irving, a waiter, arrives with Imelda Ornelas, a housekeeper originally from Veracruz, Mexico. José Gallinat, a friend who escaped from Cuba in 1960, translates Potts’s words into Spanish for Imelda. The scene touches everyone.

Besides making marriages, Elkton manufactured 40-millimeter shells during World War II in buildings now occupied by Thiokol Propulsion, who won't tell you about the classified stuff they’re making, just that it relates to Space. At the nearby Gore-Tex factory I ask why my expensive fishing jacket, made with the waterproof fabric, gets wet in the rain. “Didn't wash it, didn’t dry it, did you?” asks Cynthia Amon, Gore-Tex associate. Washing and drying, I learn, regenerates the material. I am escorted upstairs to view dozens of washers sloshing swatches of newly made Gore-Tex for as long as 250 hours. I am told that if the fabric leaks water after being dried, the batch will be discarded. I am impressed.

On a cool afternoon Mike Dixon, who has documented that George Washington passed through Cecil County at least 46 times, takes me to Elk Landing south of town. Here oak and beech trees branch near Little Elk Creek as it eases toward the Chesapeake. “In the War of 1812, 200 British Royal Marines rowed up this river and fired on our local militia right there,” he says, pointing to a knoll. Noting the legendary toughness of His Majesty’s marines, Dixon exults, “That day we whipped the British!”

Britannia has taken its revenge. No member of the royal family has ever been married in Elkton. o

3:30 p.m. sheppard and Susan McHenry and wedding party

MORI

FORMATION

There's more on 21921 at national geographic.com/ngm/0202. Tell us why we should cover

at nationalgeographic.com/ngm /zipcode/0202 or mail your suggestion to PO Box 96095, Washington, DC 20090- 6095, E-mail: zip@national geographic.com

Emma, a Great Dane, bore wedding rings on her col- lar and smooches the bride to the amusement of her daughter, April, and husband, Shep.

Sometimes | wonder which one of us has more wisdom and which one has more joy. And we both thank plastic. Because it's more than a toy: It's in my hip replacement and

my hearing aid, so | can help her see that nothing will hold me back. With a little help, we can share this happiness for yeBtsaiGhco ms

sHow Ba aottics tqughed your lif >

is hal American”

ONE THAT ALMOST GOT AWAY

~ Final Edit

y ¢ 3

it} RY aN iki. fe

Paroxysm of Fire

The Sicilian night shook with earthquakes as Carsten Peter waited for this shot last July 17.

After several days on Mount Etna he had almost decided to leave “because nothing was happening.” But he was determined to capture one of the quick, intermittent displays—called paroxysms—that had been occurring that summer. When the southeast crater finally blew at 2 a.m., he got his chance. The sky bloomed; fountains of magma shot 600 feet high (above), lobbing hot missiles toward Carsten, who worked at a safe distance, 2,000 feet away.

He kept shooting until the action subsided. Then, as he prepared to leave, a fissure split the foot of the cr:

ter, and glowing lava started to spill. “This image,” he says, “turned out to be the last paroxysm

before Etna’s big July eruption.” | MORE ON OUR WEBSITE

| You can send this picture as an electronic greeting card at nationalgeographic.com/ ngm/0202.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * FEBRUARY 2002

TOMORROW TOYOTA

In 1997, Toyota was the first car company to mass-produce a hybrid vehicle. By combining gasoline and electric power, the Prius reduces smog-forming emissions* and cuts gas consumption in half. In short, it has revolutionized the way cars affect our environment.

Now we're road-testing our hydrogen-powered fuel cell hybrid SUV. Its only emission is pure water. Beyond that, who knows. But no matter what, fresh alternatives won't be found overnight. They'll be the result of 90% perspiration,

And 10% inspiration.

www.toyota.com/tomorrow

Challenges

for Humanity

When Epidemics Shake the World

hey are too small to be seen with the naked eye, but disease microbes are among the most powerful forces on the planet, stopping armies, - ending dynasties, decimating populations. The challenge has been to control them—and the ailments they cause (see “War on Disease,” pages 4-31). Until the 20th century there were few remedies for serious illnesses, and little could be done to keep contagious ones from spread- ing. Mass infections such as the plague, which is thought to have killed one in four Europeans during the 14th century, were often explained as divine pun- ishment. The truth is more com- plex: A subtle interplay among microbe, host, social conditions, and environment lies behind every epidemic. In an epidemic a fast-spreading disease affects large numbers in _ one location. A pandemic is an epidemic spanning continents. As people increasingly traveled around the world, diseases did too. Traffic along trade routes dispersed sickness as efficiently as it did wealth. Malaria was unknown in the Americas before the first European explorers arrived in the 15th century; by

MORE ON OUR WEBSITE

For news from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about specific illnesses, check out “Resources” at nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0202. AOL Keyword: NatGeoMag

the 19th century it was firmly rooted as far west as California. Conditions must be right for epidemics to take hold. Climate, sanitation, and the health of sus- ceptible subjects all play roles in an infection’s success. Survivors of some diseases, such as yellow fever, build immunity, making later outbreaks less likely. Other diseases are masters of transfor- mation. Influenza can mutate so

year's strain may not protect a host from the next year’s version. And it can spread swiftly. In the 1918-19 pandemic influenza traveled faster and farther than any other killer disease in history. Each year health officials scram- ble to develop a new vaccine and to deliver it before the new flu can outpace distribution.

—Margaret G, Zackowitz Senior Writer

rapidly that immunity to one

How Sickness Spreads

Though many diseases have menaced humans over time, microbes are transmitted in only a few ways.

Some are invited in: Dys- entery and cholera are con- sumed with contaminated water or food.

Others are delivered by insects. Yellow fever and malaria arrive in the bite of certain mosquitoes. Bu- bonic plague is spread from rodents to people by fleas.

Perhaps the most com- mon form of transmission involves breathing airborne germs exhaled by an infect-

ed person. Tuberculosis and

influenza are usually spread this way—and smallpox used to be. Millions died of smallpox before a vaccine was developed and imple- mented worldwide; the last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in 1977, Today the smallpox virus is known to exist only in two labora- tories, one in the United States, the other in Russia.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC + FEBRUARY 2002

NORTH ~ AMERICA

DYSENTERY More Civil War soldiers died of diseases, espe- cially this one, than in battle.

YELLOW FEVER French construc- tion of the Panama Canal was halted in 1889 when workers fell ill with this and other trop- ical diseases.

@ smaipox Arriving with Europeans in the 1520s, smallpox led in part to the fall of the Aztec in Mexico and the Inca in Peru.

Pizarro 1532: Smalipox was his. ally in Peru.

In some social circles in 19th- century London pan is nearly every person was infectéd,

MALARIA

Trading voyages spread this tropical disease from Africa to the New World.

AFRICA

her son, William,

Duke of Gloucester 1700: Smalipox ended their bloodline.

Wilbur Wright 1912: Typhoid terminated his career.

¥

\

By the mid-1300s crowding had overwhelmed urban sanitation

in Europe, and the Black Deatty swept in from Asia. ~~

CHOLERA

Its recorded history

began in 1817 with

N. an epidemic in

y northeastern India.

‘Seven cholera pan- demics have been

\ \ documented since.

x

o-

within a year. } AUSTRALIA ~ nat ‘ &

MAP BY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAPS. PORTRAIT ART BY GARY ELDRIDGE: IMAGES OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE, PRINCESS ANNE, AND WILLIAM, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER, NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON; IMAGES OF FRANCISCO PIZARRO, WILBUR WRIGHT, AND NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Charlotte Bronte 1800s: She suffered from tuberculosis.

Napoleon Bonaparte 1803: Yellow fever was his enemy

in the Caribbean.

Personal History

Infectious diseases have cut short careers as well as military campaigns, sending ripples through history.

Tuberculosis afflicted the Bronté family, including Charlotte, author of Jane Eyre. Weakened by TB, she died at 39 in 1855.

William, sole heir of Prin: cess Anne, died of small- pox in 1700. As queen of England, Anne knew she would be the last of her British bloodline to rule.

in 1896, while his brother convalesced from typhoid fever, Wilbur Wright decided that they should build a fly- ing machine. Sixteen years later Wilbur himself was dead of typhoid.

In 1532 Pizarro’s conquis- tadores found the Inca of Peru already reduced by smallpox, introduced in the Americas a decade earlier.

Yellow fever hit Napoleon's Caribbean garrisons so hard it helped persuade him to give up hope of empire in the New World and sell Loui- siana to the U.S. in 1803.

RO) A D,

Return to Mount Etna

A volcano erupts, up close and ver)

e first saw Mount Etna

at the age of 15, visiting

with his parents from Eurasburg, Germany. “The de- sire was awakened in me,” pho- tographer Carsten Peter says. “As soon as I was able to travel on my own, I went to Mount Etna. It is my home volcano.”

But he had never seen the

mountain erupt the way it did last summer, when he spent a week holed up in an abandoned

: personal observation station as the mountain exploded around him. “Most people are fasci- nated by films of volcanoes,” says Carsten, who has also covered glaciers in Greenland, caves in Chile, and volcanoes in the South Pacific and Russia for NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. “For me, that’s not

enough. I have to see

it in reality, eye

to eye.”

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * FEBRUARY 2002

CARSTEN PETER

ON ASSIGNMENT

On the Front Lines

articipant as well as

observer, photographer

Karen Kasmauski admin- isters a dose of polio vaccine to a baby in Dhaka, Bangladesh (right). Karen became inspired by public health workers she met around the world as she sought ways to visually tell the story of humans and disease. “These incredible people are frontline soldiers, doing things on very

small budgets but accomplishing great results,” she says. “They find simple solutions that work.” Karen also photographed this issue’s article on HIV/AIDS, working with staff writer Michael Klesius. Among the people Mike interviewed was Phimjai Inthamoon (right, with Mike), herself HIV-positive, who has founded a group in Chiang Mai, Thailand, that links local

Author Peter Benchley (below) “begged for the chance” to write our article about Cuba's reefs, to see Cuba on land and in

the water. “| did a story for the magazine on the Cayman Islands

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

HIV-positive residents with Buddhist monks to assure those infected that others still care about the

“I met ordinary people like her in the trenches, out in the communities, reaching out to people suffering from this disease,” Mike says, echoing Karen’s words. “The challenges

of the disease are daunting, but | came back more optimistic than I had been.”

in the 1980s,” he recalls. “That's the closest | ever got to Cuba, geo- graphically next door but essen tially a world away. Because of the isolation Cuba has endured for the past 40 years, much of it has been untouched by divers.”

David Doubilet is renowned as one of the world’s great underwater photog: raphers. But he was delighted to be in the air too this time, flying over the Carib- bean in a 1949 AN-2 Russian biplane. “| love old airplanes,” says David. “They're my secret passion and thrill.” From the venerable craft he made aerial images of the Cayo Largo

DAVID DOUBILET

+ FEBRUARY 2002

BOTH BY KAREN KASMAUSK’

reefs. “It's important to fly when you're doing an underwater story,” he says. “You get an idea of what the underseascape looks like.”

Call Marco Pinna, author of our article on Mount Etna, a pioneer: An editor for our ItalianJanguage edition, he’s the first staffer from one of our 20 local-language editions to pen an article for the English-language magazine. Marco rushed from Rome to Sicily as the show started. “It was absolutely breathtaking,” he says. “When the sun went down, the whole mountain lit up.”

MORE ON OUR WEBSITE

Find more stories from our authors and photographers, including their best, worst, and quirkiest experiences, at nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0202. AOL Keyword: NatGeoMag

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FROM OUR ARCHIVES

Flashback

G, G. HUBBARD

DOORWAYS OF DISEASE

Angels in Disguise

“These very alarming persons are not, as might be

supposed, night riders or vigilantes surreptitiously

disposing of a victim,” assured this photo’s caption

in the Geocrapuic’s April 1910 portfolio, “Scenes

in Italy.” Instead the men—masked to protect their

anonymity—belonged to a secret society known

as the Brethren of the Misericordia. As penance for

their sins, or to “fulfill some vow,” members trans-

ported the sick to hospitals, buried the dead, and

collected money for the poor. You can send this month's Flashback as an electronic greeting card and access the Flashback photo archives at nationalgeographic.com/ ngm/flashback/0202. AOL Keyword: NatGeoMag

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC (ISSN 0027 9358) 1S PUBLISHED MONTYRLY BY THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY 1145 171} ST MA. WASHINGION, DC 20036-4688. $34.00 A YEAR FOR UL. DELIVERY, $6.00 PER SINGLE COPY (INCLUDES POSTAGE AND HANDING), PERIODICALS POSTAGE PRD AI WASHINGTON, DC, AND AI ADOITONAL MAILING OFFICES. POSTMASTER: SEND ADORESS CHANGES TO NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, PO BOX 63002, TAMPA, FL 32663-3002.

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